graduates relative to high school graduates.

The US experienced two dramatic changes in the structure of education in a 50 year period. The first was a large expansion of educational attainment; the second, an increase in test score gaps between college-bound and non-college-bound students. This paper documents the impact of these two...

This paper constructs quality adjusted labor inputs for 50 countries, disaggregated into 7 school levels. Our estimates of labor qualities are based on the wages of immigrants observed in 11 host countries. Based on these estimated labor inputs, we address two questions. First, we estimate the...

The US experienced two dramatic changes in the structure of education in a fifty year period. The first was a large expansion of educational attainment; the second, an increase in test score gaps between college bound and non-college bound students. We study the impact of these two trends on the...

Since 1950, U.S. educational attainment has increased substantially. While the median student in 1950 dropped out of high school, the median student today attends some college. In an environment with ability heterogeneity and positive sorting between ability and school tenure, the expansion of...

It is well known that poor countries are much less productive in agriculture than in the rest of the economy, and that it is hard to account for these productivity gaps. In this paper, we study US states during 1980–2009. We find that there are large productivity gaps between agriculture...

We document for nine countries ranging from rich (Canada, U.S.) to poor (India, Indonesia) that average wages are higher in non–agriculture than in agriculture. We measure sectoral human capital and find that it accounts for the entire wage gap in the U.S. and most of the wage gaps...

Does lifecycle human capital accumulation vary across countries? If so, why? This paper seeks to answer these questions by studying U.S. immigrants, who come from a wide variety of countries but work in a common labor market. We document that returns to potential experience among U.S. immigrants...

In poor countries, labor productivity in agriculture is considerably lower than in the rest of the economy. We assess whether this well known fact implies that labor is mis-allocated between the two sectors. We make several observations that suggest otherwise. First, the same fact holds for US...

This paper introduces a new data set of state-level physical capital in the United States from 1840 to 2000. The new data is combined with measures of the labor force, human capital, land, and output by state to perform traditional accounting decom- positions. Growth in measured inputs accounts...