Many studies find a notable return to college quality. Dale and Krueger (2002, 2011) only do until they address selection bias concerns by proxying for ambition and by matching students with similar admission outcomes but different matriculation decisions. Although we employ similar...

Increasingly researchers include information about noncognitive abilities in their analyses of similar people's educational choices and subsequent labor market outcomes. We contribute to this literature by considering the dual roles of confidence in one's abilities and noncognitive skills and...

Focused on human capital, economists typically explain about half of the gender earnings gap. For a national sample of MBAs, we account for 82 percent of the gap by incorporating noncognitive skills (e.g., confidence and assertiveness) and preferences regarding family, career, and jobs. Those...

We consider the “mismatch” hypothesis in the context of graduate management education. Both blacks and Hispanics, conditional on a rich set of human capital variables, prior earnings and work experience, and noncognitive attributes, are favored in admission to top 50 MBA programs. To test...

A large literature has focused on estimating the returns to schooling and has typically done so by incorporating institutional heterogeneity in quality along merely one dimension (such as average SAT scores). Using longitudinal survey data of registrants for the GMAT exam and school level...

Despite the Ethiopian government's commitment to attracting foreign direct investment to its emerging manufacturing sector and its shared interests with Chinese private businesses in building profitable investments, relations between Chinese private businesses and the Ethiopian government are...

Since the onset of HIV/AIDS awareness in the early 1980s, much attention has centered around the substantial negative effects of the disease throughout the world. This paper provides evidence of a secondary effect the disease has had on sexual behavior in the United States. Using a...

Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we estimate the impact of breastfeeding initiation and duration on multiple cognitive, health, and behavioral outcomes spanning early childhood through adolescence. To mitigate the potential bias from misspecification, we employ a doubly robust...

This paper analyzes the microeconomic sources of wage inequality in the United States from 1967-2012. Decomposing inequality into factors categorized by degree of personal responsibility, we find that education is able to explain more than twice as much of inequality today as 45 years ago....