In his classic work on the economics of fertility, Becker (1960) suggests that children are likely “normal.” We examine this contention. Our first step is documenting an empirical regularity about the cross section of non-Hispanic white married couples in the U.S.: When we restrict...

In standard economic theory, labor supply decisions depend on the complete set of prices: the wage and the prices of relevant consumption goods. Nonetheless, most of theoretical and empirical work ignores prices other than wages when studying labor supply. The question we address in this paper...

This paper documents a little-noticed feature of U.S. labor markets -- very large variation in the labor supply of married women across cities. We focus on cross-city differences in commuting times as a potential explanation for this variation. We start with a model in which commuting times...

Economists generally assume, implicitly, that "the return to schooling" is invariant across local labor markets. We demonstrate that this outcome pertains if and only if preferences are homothetic - a special case that seems unlikely. Our theory predicts that returns to education will instead be...

We studied the effect of physician incentives in an HMO network. Physician incentives are controversial because they may induce doctors to make treatment decisions that differ from those they would choose in the absence of incentives. We set out a theoretical framework for assessing the degree...

We evaluate the consequences of a recent regulatory reform in Portugal, which substantially reduced the cost of firm entry. Our analysis uses matched employer–employee data, which provide unusually rich information on the characteristics of founders and employees associated with new firms...

We examine inferences about old age mortality that arise when researchers use survey data matched to death records. We show that even small rates of failure to match respondents can lead to substantial bias in the measurement of mortality rates at older ages. This type of measurement error is...

We use 1940 Census data to study the intergenerational transmission of human capital for children born in the 1920s and educated during an era of expanding but unequally distributed public school resources. Looking at the gains in educational attainment between parents and children, we document...