In this paper we study the social, demographic and economic origins of social security. The data for the U.S. and for a cross section of countries make it clear that urbanization and industrialization are strongly associated with the rise of social insurance. We describe a model economy in which...

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...

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 studies the multidimensional nature of investments in children within a dynamic framework. In particular, we examine the roles of parental time investments, purchased home goods/services inputs, and market-based child care services. We first document strong increases in total...

This paper studies the multidimensional nature of investments in children within a dynamic framework. In particular, we examine the roles of parental time investments, purchased home goods/services inputs, and market-based child care services. We first document strong increases in total...

We develop a dynastic human capital investment framework to study the importance of potential market failures - family borrowing constraints and uninsured labor market risk - as well as the process of intergenerational ability transmission in determining human capital investments in children at...

In this paper we describe the important features of executive compensation in the US from 1993 to 2006. Some confirm what has been found for earlier periods and some are novel. Notable facts are that: the compensation distribution is highly skewed; each year, a sizeable fraction of chief...

We study the problem of an investor that buys an equity stake in an entrepreneurial venture, under the assumption that the former cannot monitor the latter's operations. The dynamics implied by the optimal incentive scheme is rich and quite different from that induced by other models of repeated...

The role of unanticipated changes in money growth for aggregate fluctuations is reexamined using the methods of quantitative equilibrium business cycle theory. A stochastic growth model with money is constructed that has the feature, following Lucas (1972, 1975), that production and trade take...

This paper investigates informal employment in Brazil's highly regulated labor market, focusing on the intensive margin of informality within formal firms. Using a comprehensive dataset of labor audits conducted from 1997 to 2012, we find that formal firms caught with informal workers face...