The economic and social mobility of a generation may be largely determined by the time it enters school given early developing and persistent gaps in child achievement by family income and the importance of adolescent skill levels for educational attainment and lifetime earnings. After providing...

This paper investigates the importance of family borrowing constraints in determining human capital investments in children at early and late ages. We begin by providing new evidence from the Children of the NLSY (CNLSY) which suggests that borrowing constraints bind for at least some families...

During the period from 1880 to 1950, publicly managed retirement security programs became an important part of the social fabric in most advanced economies. In this paper we study the social, demographic and economic origins of social security. We describe a model economy in which demographics,...

European economic growth has been weak, compared to the US, since the 80s. In previous work (Krueger and Kumar, 2003), we argued that the European focus on specialized, vocational education might have been effective during the 60s and 70s, but resulted in a growth gap relative to the US during...

This paper investigates the impact of federal extramural research funding on total expenditures for life sciences research and development (R&D) at U.S. universities, to determine whether federal R&D funding spurs funding from non-federal (private and state/local government) sources. We use a...

In this paper, we develop a model of technology adoption and economic growth in which households optimally obtain either a concept-based, general' education or a skill-specific, vocational' education. General education is more costly to obtain, but enables workers to operate new technologies...

Motivated by theories of the firm, which we classify as technological' or organizational,' we analyze the determinants of firm size across industries and across countries in a sample of 15 European countries. We find that, on average, firms facing larger markets are larger. At the industry...