This paper analyzes the effects of assignment to a one-year college preparatory program on academic performance in college. To measure the value added from pre-college programs, we use a large dataset of United States Naval Academy students from the 1988 to 2018 graduating classes, of which a...

Technological change was unskilled-labor-biased during the early Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but is skill-biased today. This fact is not embedded in extant unified growth models. We develop a model of the transition to sustained economic growth...

Nation building, the simultaneous allocation of economic and military aid in con- ict environments, has cost the world trillions of dollars over the last half century. Yet few attempts have been made to quantify the potential growth eects for the recip- ient country from the provision of this...

This paper explores the eects of human capital on workers during the latter 19th century by examining the specic case of the U.S. Navy. During this time, naval ocers belonged either to a regular or an engineer corps and had tasks assigned for their specialized training and experience. To test...

This paper develops a model that captures the key features of the Industrial Revolution and the Great Divergence between the industrializing \North" and the lagging \South." In particular, a convincing story is needed for why North-South divergence occurred so dramatically during the late 19th...

Over the past half-century there have been over three hundred instances of nation building initiatives, episodes where countries jointly give military and economic aid to a country embroiled in conflict. Despite the prevalence and expense of this foreign policy, little research has explored the...

Historically, industrialization has been associated with falling relative returns to skills. This fact is at odds with most theories of industrialization, which tend to imply rising skill premia as natural concomitants to economic growth. This paper develops a very simple model of historical...