This paper presents a model of human capital accumulation to better understand the take-off from stagnation to growth from 1500 to 2000 AD. Finitely lived households choose the quantity and quality of children. The key ingredient of the model is a spillover from parents to children in the...

This paper develops some general conditions under which complementarities between individual agents imply that assortative matching is efficient. Our analysis has four main findings. First, when agents are organized into equal-sized groups, just as in Becker (1973), the presence of within-group...

Why do fertility rates vary so much across countries? Why are European fertility rates so much lower than American fertility rates? To answer these questions we extend the Barro-Becker framework to incorporate the decision to accumulate human capital (which determines earnings) and health...

We present a model of endogenous schooling and earnings to isolate the causal effect of parents' education on children's education and earnings outcomes. The model suggests that parents' education is positively related to children's earnings, but its relationship with children's education is...

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We discuss a simple model in which parents and children make investments in the children’s education, investments for other purposes, and parents can transfer cash to their children. We show that for an identifiable set of parent-child pairs, parents will rationally under-invest in their...

In this project we extend an augmented lifecycle model, incorporating a Grossman-style model of health capital, to enhance understanding of factors influencing consumption, wealth and health. We develop three primary results when using the model to explore the effects of stylized versions of...

We develop a model of retirement and human capital investment to study the effects of tax and retirement policies. Workers choose the supply of raw labor (career length) and also the human capital embodied in their labor. Our model explains a significant fraction of the US-Europe difference in...

We build a model of retirement and assess what are the main forces that drove the macroeconomic pattern in retirement in the US economy during the 20th century. We in particular consider the role of technological progress, demographic change and the Social Security system.

Many new technologies display long adoption lags, and this is often interpreted as evidence of frictions inconsistent with the standard neoclassical model. We study the diffusion of the tractor in American agriculture between 1910 and 1960-a well-known case of slow diffusion-and show that the...