We develop a model in which a worker’s skills determine the worker’s current wage and sector. The market and the worker are initially uncertain about some of the worker’s skills. Endogenous wage changes and sector mobility occur as labor market participants learn about these...

The fraction of U.S. college graduate women entering professional programs increased substantially just after 1970, and the age at first marriage among all U.S. college graduate women began to soar around the same year. We explore the relationship between these two changes and the diffusion of...

We present the first estimates of the returns to years of schooling before 1940 using a large sample individuals (from the 1915 Iowa State Census). The returns to a year of high school or college were substantial in 1915—about 11 percent for all males and in excess of 12 percent for young...

Women are currently the majority of U.S. college students and of those receiving a bachelor's degree, but were 39 percent of undergraduates in 1960. We use three longitudinal data sets of high school graduates in 1957, 1972, and 1992 to understand the narrowing of the gender gap in college and...

Experimental estimates from Moving to Opportunity (MTO) show no significant impacts of moves to lowerâ€poverty neighborhoods on adult economic selfâ€sufficiency four to seven years after random assignment. The authors disagree with Clampetâ€Lundquist and Massey's claim that MTO was a...

We present the first estimates of the returns to years of schooling before 1940 using a large sample individuals (from the 1915 Iowa State Census). The returns to a year of high school or college were substantial in 1915—about 11 percent for all males and in excess of 12 percent for young...

Why do indemnity insurance plans cost substantially more per capita—77% more in our study—than HMOs? We answer this question using data from a large organization’s insurance pool, covering 215,000 lives. We decompose cost differences for eight major medical conditions into...

We study the impact of economic crisis on health in Mexico. There have been four wide-scale economic crises in Mexico in the past two decades, the most recent in 1995–96. We find that mortality rates for the very young and the elderly increase or decline less rapidly in crisis years as...

A puzzling feature of many medical innovations is that they simultaneously appear to reduce unit costs and increase total costs. We consider this phenomenon by examining the diffusion of percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA)—a treatment for coronary artery...