We investigate the economic value of a law degree and find that for most law school graduates, the present value of a law degree typically exceeds its cost by hundreds of thousands of dollars. The median and 25th-percentile earnings premiums justify enrollment. We track lifetime earnings of a...

The literature shows that males react more favorably than females to competitive incentives. This well-known result, however, is based on experiments in which participants engage in only a one-shot contest. We conduct a series of math contests in elementary schools which are similar to past...

Bankruptcy rates vary tremendously across states, and it is not obvious why. The number of candidate explanations is large relative to the number of states. To overcome this problem, we use zip-code-level data to identify the importance of demographic variables using within-state variation. This...

Using 2000 Census data, we describe the relationship between women's education and marriage outcomes. Women's education is strongly related to husband's income and marital status. This relationship is highly nonlinear and varies across the distribution of husband's earnings. Roughly half of the...