In this chapter, we articulate a developmental perspective on personality traits from early childhood through adulthood. In the first section, we address two topics that are fundamental in defining the most important traits at each point in the life span: the relationship between temperament and...

Past estimates of the effect of family income on child development have often been plagued by endogeneity and measurement error. In this paper, we use an instrumental variables strategy to estimate the causal effect of income on children's math and reading achievement. Our identification derives...

This paper uses data from the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth cohorts (NLSY79 and NLSY97) to estimate changes in the effects of ability and family income on educational attainment for youth in their late teens during the early 1980s and early 2000s. Cognitive ability plays an...

The present paper develops a theoretical model of labor supply with domestic production. It is shown that the structural components of the model can be identified without using a distribution factor, thereby generalizing the initial results of Apps and Rees (1997) and Chiappori (1997). The...

We estimate dynamic models of elder-care arrangements using data from the Assets and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old Survey. We model the use of institutional care, formal home health care, care provided by a child, and care provided by a spouse in the selection of each care arrangement,...

This paper tests whether the correlation between wages and the spatial concentration of employment can be explained by unobserved worker productivity differences. Residential location is used as a proxy for a worker's unobserved productivity, and average workplace commute time is used to test...

Is lifetime inequality mainly due to differences across people established early in life or to differences in luck experienced over the working lifetime? We answer this question within a model that features idiosyncratic shocks to human capital, estimated directly from data, as well as...

In a predominantly low-income population-based longitudinal sample of 1,292 children followed from birth, higher level of salivary cortisol assessed at ages 7, 15, and 24 months was uniquely associated with lower executive function ability and to a lesser extent IQ at age 3 years. Measures of...

The classical version of early development by psychoanalysis has been largely challenged by developmental psychology, and particularly by attachment theory. Psychopathology appears to be much more linked with a sequence of events involving interpersonal relationship disorders rather than with...

This paper provides a theory that explains the cross-country distribution of average years of schooling, as well as the so called human capital premium puzzle. In our theory, credit frictions as well as differences in access to public education, fertility and mortality turn out to be the key...