Recent theories of endogenous growth suggest that changes in tax rates may permanently affect growth. However, attempts to quantify these growth effects have reached very different conclusions in spite of a common theoretical framework: the neoclassical growth model with human capital...

The fraction of persons holding a college degree differs nearly two-fold across U.S. states. This paper documents data related to state educational attainment differences and explores possible explanations. It shows that highly educated states employ skillbiased technologies, specialize in...

This paper offers new evidence on the sources of cross-country income differences. It exploits the idea that observing immigrant workers from different countries in the same labor market provides an opportunity to estimate their human-capital endowments. These estimates suggest that human and...

The economic performance of U.S. immigrants differs substantially from that of natives in ways that pose difficulties for standard theories of migration. In particular, immigrants cluster geographically and are often employed together. Immigrant earnings differ by origin and time spent in the...

A number of recent papers have investigated the growth effects of tax reforms in the context of neoclassical growth models where growth is due to human capital accumulation. Stokey and Rebelo (1995) show that the predicted growth effects disagree to a striking extent and are highly sensitive to...

International migration can be viewed as a natural experiment, placing a worker into a different economic environment while holding his human capital endowment fixed. Migration data therefore provide an opportunity to learn not only about the economic forces underlying migration, but also about...

The literature on the growth effects of flat rate taxes focuses entirely on models with infinite horizons and constant returns to private inputs in human capital accumulation. In contrast, the traditional human capital literature assumes finite lifetimes and, based on microeconomic evidence,...

Since 1950, U.S. educational attainment has increased substantially. While the median student in 1950 dropped out of high school, the median student today attends some college. In an environment with ability heterogeneity and positive sorting between ability and school tenure, the expansion of...