One literature documents a significant, black-white gap in average test scores, while another finds a substantial narrowing of the gap during the 1980's, and stagnation in convergence after. We use two data sources -- the Long Term Trends NAEP and AFQT scores for the universe of applicants to...

This article presents evidence relating cross-country differences in intergenerational mobility to differences in inequality of skills.

We investigate sibling correlations in health status using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and Bayesian methods that allow us to estimate the covariance structure of a system of latent variable equations. Across a battery of outcomes, we estimate that between 50% and 60% of health status can...

How do parental investments respond to health endowments at birth? Recent studies have combined insights from an earlier theoretical literature on household resource allocation with improved identification strategies to capture causal effects of early life health shocks. We describe empirical...

This article presents evidence on long-term trends in intergenerational economic mobility in the United States and considers the prospects for intergenerational mobility going forward.

This article reviews the concept of skills mismatch in the labor market and examines its role in explaining ongoing low levels of hiring and high levels of unemployment during the current economic recovery.

In recent decades, blacks have experienced substantially less upward mobility and substantially more downward mobility from one generation to the next than whites. These results are shown to be highly robust to a variety of measurement issues. The author examines rates of intergenerational...

We consider the effects of daytime fasting by pregnant women during the lunar month of Ramadan on their children's test scores at age seven. Using English register data, we find that scores are .05 to .08 standard deviations lower for Pakistani and Bangladeshi students exposed to Ramadan in...