This paper presents economic models of child development that capture the essence of recent findings from the empirical literature on skill formation. The goal of this essay is to provide a theoretical framework for interpreting the evidence from a vast empirical literature, for guiding the next...

This paper examines the effects of skill advantages at age six on different types of parental investments, and long-run outcomes up to age 27. We exploit exogenous variation in skills due to school entry rules, combining 20 years of Chilean administrative records with a regression discontinuity...

We apply the unordered monotonicity setting of Heckman and Pinto (2018) to estimate the distribution of response types and the counterfactual outcomes associated with the choice of a STEM or non-STEM college. Instrumental variation is induced by the proximity to universities offering STEM and/or...