There is growing state and national attention on addressing the achievement gap and increasing reading proficiency by 3rd grade. As state governments continue to face challenging fiscal conditions, there is a need to identify strategies that will lead to improved school readiness for at-risk...

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Parental beliefs, recognised by child psychologists as a causal influence on early development, are incorporated into a two-period model of human capital accumulation. In the first period parents transfer their beliefs, distinct from genes, to their child by signalling their "belief in a just...

This paper derives the value and the risk of aggregate human capital in a dynamic equilibrium production model with Duffie-Epstein preferences. In this setting the expected return of a risky asset is a function of the asset's covariance with consumption growth and a weighted average of the...

In this paper I propose and estimate a dynamic model of education, borrowing, and work decisions of high school graduates. I examine the effect of relaxing borrowing constraints on educational attainment by simulating increases in the amount students are permitted to borrow from government...

We discuss a simple model in which parents and children make investments in the children’s education, investments for other purposes, and parents can transfer cash to their children. We show that for an identifiable set of parent-child pairs, parents will rationally under-invest in their...

This paper examines the early origins of observed health disparities by education. We determine the role played by cognitive, noncognitive and early health endowments, and we identify the causal effect of education on health and health-related behaviors. We show that family background...

Using a sequential model of educational choices, we investigate the effect of educational choices on labor market, health, and social outcomes. Unobserved endowments drive the correlations in unobservables across choice and outcome equations. We proxy these endowments with numerous measurements...

We develop a human capital model with borrowing constraints explicitly derived from government student loan (GSL) programs and private lending under limited commitment. The model helps explain the persistent strong positive correlation between ability and schooling in the U.S., as well as the...

Why has the expansion of women's economic and political rights coincided with economic development? This paper investigates this question, focusing on a key economic right for women: property rights. The basic hypothesis is that the process of development (i.e., capital accumulation and...