In Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty uses the market value of tradeable assets to measure both productive capital and wealth. As a measure of wealth this is problematic because it ignores the value of human capital and transfer wealth, which have grown enormously over the last 300...

We study the distribution of economic activity, as proxied by lights at night, across 250,000 grid cells of average area 560 square kilometers. We first document that nearly half of the variation can be explained by a parsimonious set of physical geography attributes. A full set of country...

I use microeconomic estimates of the effect of health on individual outcomes to construct macroeconomic estimates of the proximate effect of health on GDP per capita. I use a variety of methods to construct estimates of the return to health, which I combine with cross-country and historical data...

We study inequality, intergenerational mobility, and returns to education in a general-equilibrium model. Individuals earn wages depending on their education and their innate abilities. Education is purchased with transfers received from parents, while ability is a random variable which is...

This paper examines compliance with federal minimum wage laws in the U.S. apparel industry and analyzes the impact of new methods of intervention designed to improve regulatory performance. Drawing on data from a randomized survey of apparel contractors, the author evaluates the impact of...

Since its inception more than twenty years ago, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has been the subject of an intense public debate on its effectiveness. This article analyzes the determinants of establishment-level compliance with specific safety and health standards as a...

The goal of this paper is to examine the implied penalty policies underlying the remedies created by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in terms of the policies' impact on employer and union behaviors. We present a simple model of deterrence as a means of evaluating workplace penalty...