Many social commentators have raised concerns over the possibility that increased sorting in a society can lead to greater inequality. To investigate this we construct a dynamic model of intergenerational education acquisition, fertility, and marital sorting and parameterize the steady state to...

Over the last few decades many US states have made large changes to their systems of financing K-12 education with the explicit objective of providing more equitable educational opportunities. There has been relatively little accompanying analysis, however, examining how these changes might...

The non-existence of credit markets implies that initial income is a determinant of who actually obtains an education. We consider the outcome of a process in which income is taxed to provide subsidies for education. and taxes are chosen by majority voting. We characterize the outcome as a...

This paper analyzes within the context of a multicommunity model the effects of several policies that affect the financing of public education. The key features of the model are: (I) individuals differ with respect to income, (ii) individuals choose in which community to reside, (iii)...

This paper examines the effects of a zoning regulation on local redistribution in a multicommunity model. Each community chooses, by majority vote within the community, a property tax rate. The proceeds from this tax are then redistributed within the community on a per capita basis. Individuals...

This paper examines the effect of different education financing systems on the level and distribution of resources devoted to public education. We focus on California, which in the 1970's moved from a system of mixed local and state financing to one of effectively pure state finance and...

This paper examines the effect of community zoning regulations on allocations and welfare in a two-community model. Each community uses a local property tax to finance public education. Tax rates are determined by majority vote within each community, and individuals choose in which community to...

We examine a panel data set for the US states over the period 1950-1990 and use it to assess the effects of growth in personal income and number of students on expenditure on public primary and secondary education. Our analysis suggests that the share of personal income devoted to education is...

We document a robust negative relationship between the log of mean annual hours in an occupation and the standard deviation of log annual hours within that occupation. We develop a unified model of occupational choice and labor supply that features heterogeneity across occupations in the return...

Why do living standards differ so much across countries? A consensus in the development literature is that differences in productivity are a dominant source of these differences. But what accounts for productivity differences across countries? One explanation is that frontier technologies and...