This article argues that a satisfactory theory of wealth inequality should account not only for the marginal distribution of wealth, but also for the joint distribution of wealth and earnings. The article describes the joint distribution of retirement wealth and lifetime earnings in the Panel...

This paper investigates the role of discount rate heterogeneity for wealth inequality. The key idea is to infer the distribution of preference parameters from the observed age profile of wealth inequality. The contribution of preference heterogeneity to wealth inequality can then be measured...

This paper is motivated by the fact that nearly half of U.S. college students drop out without earning a bachelor's degree. Its objective is to quantify how much uncertainty college entrants face about their graduation outcomes. To do so, we develop a quantitative model of college choice. The...

This paper is motivated by the fact that nearly half of U.S. college students drop out without earning a bachelor’s degree. Its objective is to quantify how much uncertainty college entrants face about their graduation outcomes. To do so, we develop a quantitative model of college choice. The...

The objective of this paper is to decompose movements in U.S. wages into movements of skill prices and labor qualities. The idea is to interpret the age-wage profiles of various birth cohorts observed in CPS data through the lens of human capital theory. Theory predicts that age-efficiency...

graduates relative to high school graduates.

This paper proposes a theory of educational attainment differences across U.S. metropolitan areas. The theory is motivated by the finding that employment in business services predicts more than 70% of the observed cross-city variation in education. In the model, agglomeration economies in the...

The US experienced two dramatic changes in the structure of education in a 50 year period. The first was a large expansion of educational attainment; the second, an increase in test score gaps between college-bound and non-college-bound students. This paper documents the impact of these two...

This paper constructs quality adjusted labor inputs for 50 countries, disaggregated into 7 school levels. Our estimates of labor qualities are based on the wages of immigrants observed in 11 host countries. Based on these estimated labor inputs, we address two questions. First, we estimate the...

Educational attainment varies greatly across countries and within countries over time. This paper asks whether the variation in education is primarily due to structural change or to within industry skill upgrading. The main finding is that within industry variation accounts for at least 2/3 of...