As college attainment expanded in the U.S., the fraction of public funds allocated to selective colleges and universities declined. Does this make sense from an efficiency standpoint, given that the majority of college entrants face the highest financial returns at selective colleges? Should the...

This paper investigates how explicitly modeling the intergenerational transmission of human capital modifies the effects of tax policies obtained from standard life-cycle models. The main finding is that the intergenerational persistence of human capital is not an important determinant of the...

College attainment differs nearly two-fold across U.S. states. This paper shows that highly educated states employ skill-biased technologies, specialize in skill-intensive industries, but do not pay lower skill premia. A theory based on agglomeration economies is developed to account for these...

Recent theories of endogenous growth suggest that changes in tax rates may permanently affect growth. However, attempts to quantify these growth effects have reached very different conclusions in spite of a common theoretical framework: the neoclassical growth model with human capital...

A number of recent papers have investigated the growth effects of tax reforms in the context of neoclassical growth models where growth is due to human capital accumulation. Stokey and Rebelo (1995) show that the predicted growth effects disagree to a striking extent and are highly sensitive to...

International migration can be viewed as a natural experiment, placing a worker into a different economic environment while holding his human capital endowment fixed. Migration data therefore provide an opportunity to learn not only about the economic forces underlying migration, but also about...

The literature on the growth effects of flat rate taxes focuses entirely on models with infinite horizons and constant returns to private inputs in human capital accumulation. In contrast, the traditional human capital literature assumes finite lifetimes and, based on microeconomic evidence,...