This study considers the eradication of hookworm disease from the American South (circa 1910) as a test of the quantity-quality (Q-Q) framework of fertility. Eradication was principally a shock to the price of quality because of three factors: hookworm (i) depresses the return to human capital...

Both policy makers and researchers have devoted considerable attention in recent years to the large current account and capital account imbalances among OECD countries. In particular, the size of the United States current account deficit has attracted intense attention and spawned numerous...

We examine changes in the characteristics of American youth between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, with a focus on characteristics that matter for labor market success. We reweight the NLSY79 to look like the NLSY97 along a number of dimensions that are related to labor market success,...

The employer-learning literature finds support for statistical discrimination on the basis of schooling. How economically relevant statistical discrimination is depends on how fast employers learn about workers’ productive types. This article is the first to estimate the speed of employer...

This paper develops a new method of estimating rich, dynamic models of health based on multiple health measures available in the HRS. We apply these methods to investigate what generates the large socioeconomic gradient in health. Preliminary results suggest a large role for initial differences...

We review and extend the empirical literature that seeks evidence of a wedge between the private and social returns to human capital, specifically education. This literature has two main strands. First, much of modern growth theory puts human capital at center-stage, building on older notions of...

Firms commonly use supervisor ratings to evaluate employees when objective performance measures are unavailable. Supervisor ratings are subjective and data containing supervisor ratings typically stem from individual firm level data sets. For both these reasons, doubts persist on how useful such...

This paper explores the extent to which migration-related capital flows can explain the variation in investment rates and current and capital account imbalances across OECD countries. Migrants must be equipped with machines, and the resulting demands for capital are likely, all else being equal,...

This paper studies the role of employer behavior in generating "negative duration dependence" -- the adverse effect of a longer unemployment spell -- by sending fictitious resumes to real job postings in 100 U.S. cities. Our results indicate that the likelihood of receiving a callback for an...