The private market of student loans has become an important source of college financing in the U.S. Unlike government student loans, the terms on private student loans (i.e., credit limits and interest rates) are based on credit scores We quantify the effects of credit scores on college...

In this paper, we consider the extent to which the aggregate happiness of a country affects the flow of people across its borders. We merge data from the World Values Survey, which produces happiness indices for 84 countries between 1981 and 2004, with three different migration datasets. We find...

Economic debate about the consequences of immigration in the US has largely focused on how influxes of foreign-born labor with little educational attainment have affected similarly-educated native-born workers. Fewer studies analyze the effect of immigration within the market for highly-educated...

In deciding upon whether to pursue an undergraduate education in the United States, a foreign student considers the expected probability of securing US employment after graduation. The H-1B visa provides a primary means of legal employment for college-educated foreign-nationals. In October 2003,...

We study order theoretic and topological implications for impatience of weakly Paretian, representable orders on infinite utility streams. As a departure from the traditional literature, we do not make any continuity assumptions in proving the existence of impatient points. Impatience is robust...

This paper employs reduced-form microeconometric analysis to examine how yearly changes in aggregate income and GDP growth affect the unemployment probability of individuals with varied skills in the United States. The paper goes beyond traditional education-based measures and assesses how...

I consider the implications of alternative bankruptcy regimes for student loans ina heterogeneous model of life-cycle earnings and risky human capital accumulation. Findings suggest that the ability level of high-school graduates drives the decision to enroll in college, while the initial human...

This paper explores the dynamic behavior of a Romer-style endogenous growth model, analyzing how changes in tax rates affect government revenue in the short run and the long run. I show that in this environment lowering taxes on financial income is unlikely to stimulate tax revenue in the long...

Commodity prices are important both as a source of shocks and for the propagation of shocks originating elsewhere in the economy. Many vector autoregression (VAR) studies estimate a gradual response of commodity prices to monetary policy shocks. Exploiting information in high-frequency financial...

This paper uses a gravity model of migration to analyze how income differentials affect the flow of immigrants into U.S. states. We add to existing literature by decomposing income differentials into short- and long-term components and by focusing on newly arrived unskilled immigrants between...