Latin American countries have some of the highest levels of income inequality in the world. However, earnings inequality significantly changed over the last three decades, increasing during the 1980s and 1990s, declining sharply in the 2000s, and stagnating or even increasing in some countries...

We model a higher education system that admits students according to their admission signal (e.g., matriculation GPA, SAT), which is, in turn, affected by their cognitive ability and socioeconomic background. We show that subsidizing education loans increases neither human capital stock nor...

This paper studies the importance of dynamic earnings modeling for the design of income contingent student loans (ICLs). ICLs have been shown to be theoretically optimal in terms of efficiency in the presence of risk aversion, adverse selection and moral hazard, and have attractive equity...

Using an unbalanced panel of close to 12,000 academic records, and difference-in-differences models and event study analyses with individual fixed effects, we evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on lower-income students' academic performance during the spring 2020 semester relative to...

Increasing earnings inequality has been an important feature of the US and UK labour markets in recent years. The increase appears to be related to an increased demand for skilled labour and an increase in the returns to education. In this paper we examine what has happened to earnings...

The main goal of this paper is to document and analyze the long-term evolution of inequality of opportunity (IOp) in the four largest European economies (France, Germany, Great Britain and Italy). Relative IOp represents an important portion of total income inequality, with values ranging from...

We seek to quantify the role of education as a mechanism through which family background affects earnings. To this end, we propose a generalisation of statistical 'mediation analysis'. In our approach, the treatment and mediator can be multidimensional. This allows us to directly and flexibly...

This paper examines how human capital based approaches explain the distribution of earnings. It assesses traditional, quasi-experimental, and new micro-based structural models, the latter of which gets at population heterogeneity by estimating individual-specific earnings function parameters....

Using panel data from the BHPS and its Understanding Society extension, we study life satisfaction (LS) and income over nearly two decades, for samples split by education, and age - to our knowledge for the first time. The highly educated went from lowest to highest LS, though their average...

This paper studies the influence of family, schools and neighborhoods on life-cycle earnings inequality. We develop an earnings dynamics model linking brothers, schoolmates and teenage parish neighbors using population register data for Denmark. We exploit differences in the timing of family...