Recent empirical studies show that the intergenerational persistence of economic status in the U.S. is much higher than previously thought. We develop a quantitative theory of inequality and intergenerational transmission of human capital where parents invest in early and college education of...

By international standards, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in Latin America is low -- around one fifth of that of the United States. Moreover, in the last five decades, Latin America has failed to catch-up in wealth to the level of the United States while other countries at similar or...

Between 1940 and 2000 there has been a substantial increase of educational attainment in the United States. What caused this trend? We develop a model of schooling decisions in order to assess the quantitative contribution of technological progress in explaining the evolution of education. We...

The large differences in income per capita across countries are mostly accounted for by differences in total factor productivity (TFP). What explains these differences in TFP across countries? Evidence suggests that the (mis)allocation of factors of production across heterogenous production...

We develop a model of the structural transformation with three sectors: agriculture, industry, and services. In addition to reallocation across sectors over time, the model also features a reallocation of consumption across services that differ in their labor intensity and a distribution sector....