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 investigates the impact of wage subsidies on skill formulation. We analyze two prototypical models of skill formation: (a) a learning-by-doing model and (b) an on-the-job training model. We develop conditions on the pricing of jobs under which the two models are equivalent. In general...

The internal rate of return to schooling is a fundamental economic parameter that is often used to assess whether expenditure on education should be increased or decreased. This paper considers alternative approaches to estimating marginal internal rates of return for different schooling levels....

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...

The internal rate of return to schooling is a fundamental economic parameter that is often used to assess whether expenditure on education should be increased or decreased. This paper considers alternative approaches to estimating marginal internal rates of return for different schooling levels....

This paper expands on Gibbons and Katz (1991) by looking at how the difference in wage losses across plant closing and layoff varies with race and gender. We find that the differences between white males and the other groups are striking and complex. The lemons effect of layoff holds for white...

To a large degree, the expansion of student aid programs to potential college students over the past 25 years in the United States has been based on the presumption that borrowing constraints present an obstacle to obtaining a college education. Economists and sociologists studying schooling...

This paper considers the statistical and economic justification for one widely-used method of adjusting data from social experiments to account for dropping-out behavior due to Bloom (1984). We generalize the method to apply to distributions not just means, and present tests of the key...

Difference in differences methods have become very popular in applied work. This paper provides a new method for inference in these models when there are a small number of policy changes. This situation occurs in many implementations of these estimators. Identification of the key parameter...

Government student loan programs must balance the need to enforce repayment among borrowers who can afford to make their payments with some form of forgiveness or repayment assistance for those who cannot. Using unique survey and administrative data from the Canada Student Loan Program, we show...