This paper first draws on a unique data set, hojok (household registers), to estimate numeracy levels in Korea from the period 1550–1630. We add evidence from Japan and China from the early modern period until 1800 to obtain a human capital estimate for East Asia. We find that numeracy was...

Analyzing the Indonesian Family Life Survey for the year 2007, this paper estimates that a 10cm increase in physical stature is associated with an increase in earnings of 7.5% for men and 13.0% for women, even after controlling for an extensive set of productivity variables. When the height...

Analyzing three datasets on black and white soldiers and the black and white populations from the same birth years, this paper finds that black soldiers during the American Civil War had much higher human capital than the black population.

This paper analyses the Indonesian Family Life Survey to show that job strenuousness is negatively related to obesity, which is largely consistent with the literature. However, this paper does not interpret the relationship as causal. Instead, efforts are made to demonstrate that the...

Effects of school choice have not been satisfactorily resolved empirically and theoretically. I provide a theory of school choice. I show that a positive assortive matching between teachers and students maximizes the production of education. Also the production can be augmented by letting...

We apply a quantile version of the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to estimate the counterfactual distribution of the test scores of Black students. In the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998--1999 (ECLS-K), we find that the gap initially appears only at the top of the...

Using the Indonesian Family Life Survey, this paper elucidates the factors related to happiness in Indonesia. Some factors yield results consistent with those in the literature, but other factors such as unemployment and the female gender turn out not to be robust. Some attempts are made to...

Although people constantly search for partners, there are always some ones who are left as singles. This paper provides a simple model to demonstrate that this can happen even in the environment most conducive to partnership, when monitoring infidelity is not perfect. The intuition is that, when...