This paper presents ten new facts on gender and top lifetime earnings inequality in Brazil, drawing on rich administrative data covering nearly the entire formal labor market from 1985 to 2018. We document significant gender disparities in lifetime earnings, particularly among top earners, where...

Can the demographic trends of increased life expectancy and decreasing birth rates, along with the labor market patterns of returns to human capital investment and changes in real hourly earnings, account for changes in women's and men's lifetime earnings? Using a Vector Error Correction Model...

The U.S. is currently the country with the highest number of COVID-19 deaths. By the second week of October 2021, over 700,000 people in the U.S. had died after contracting the virus. When estimating the cost and benefit of a COVID-19 prevention measure, the value of a statistical life (VSL) has...

The average white male born in 1900 earned 2.6 times more labor income over their lifetime than the average Black male. This gap is nearly twice as large as the more commonly studied cross-sectional Black-white earnings gap because 48% of Black males born in 1900 died before the age of 30 as...

How do education, skills, investments of parental time and school quality, and family circumstances during childhood contribute to the persistence of earnings across generations? Building on a classic literature in sociology and a more recent literature in economics, our model allows each of the...

This study uses administrative data from the German Pension Insurance and combines a wide range of regional data sources in order to shine light on regional variation in the relationship between life expectancy and lifetime earnings in Germany. Moreover, it advances understanding of which place...

Individuals vary considerably in how much they earn during their lifetimes. This study examines the role of the tax-and-transfer system in mitigating such inequalities, which could otherwise lead to disparities in living standards. Utilizing a life-cycle model, we determine that taxes and...

Individuals vary considerably in how much they earn during their lifetimes. This study examines the role of the tax-and-transfer system in mitigating such inequalities, which could otherwise lead to disparities in living standards. Utilizing a life-cycle model, we determine that taxes and...

This paper explores disparities between White, Black, and Hispanic families using a measure of lifetime earnings developed by Jacobs et al. (2022) for the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). Lifetime earnings are a particularly important measure of well-being, with relevance for wealth...

Household consumption and welfare are more strongly associated with lifetime income, but most countries base income taxes on current income and use progressive taxes to reduce inequality and provide social insurance. Is lifetime income a better tax base for a government seeking to provide social...

This chapter provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps between children from different socio-economic backgrounds, show how patterns of educational inequality vary across...

Survey measures of preference parameters provide a means for accounting for otherwise unobserved heterogeneity.This paper presents measures of relative risk tolerance based on responses to survey questions about hypothetical gambles over lifetime income.It discusses how to impute estimates of...

To obtain a more complete understanding of the persisting gender earnings gap in Germany, this paper investigates both the cross-sectional and biographical dimension of gender inequalities. Using an Oaxaca Blinder decomposition, we show that the gender gap in annual earnings is largely driven by...

In this paper, we present updated measures of racial disparities in wealth using the most recent data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), augmented by household-level estimates of defined benefit (DB) pension wealth developed by Sabelhaus and Volz (2020). Including this important asset,...

To obtain a more complete understanding of the persisting gender earnings gap in Germany, this paper investigates both the cross-sectional and biographical dimension of gender inequalities. Using an Oaxaca Blinder decomposition, we show that the gender gap in annual earnings is largely driven by...

We study the determinants of lifetime earnings (LE) inequality in the U.S. by focusing on job ladder dynamics and on-the-job learning as sources of wage growth. Using administrative data, we document that i) lower LE workers change jobs more often, which is mainly driven by nonemployment; ii)...

Standard economic theory suggests that individuals know best how to make themselves happy. Thus, policies designed to encourage more forward-looking behaviors will only reduce people's happiness. Recently, however, economists have explored the role of impatience, especially difficulties with...

The estimation of intergenerational mobility ideally requires full income histories to determine lifetime incomes. However, as applications are typically based on shorter snapshots, estimates are subject to lifecycle bias. Using long income series from Sweden and the US, we illustrate that...

To obtain a more complete understanding of the persisting gender earnings gap in Germany, this paper investigates both the cross-sectional and biographical dimension of gender inequalities. Using an Oaxaca Blinder decomposition, we show that the gender gap in annual earnings is largely driven by...

A promising strategy to reduce smartphones' environmental footprint is to increase their service lifetime, thereby reducing the demand for resource-intensive production of new devices. Most of the existing literature focuses on production-oriented measures, such as improving repairability, but...

Using thousands of essays written by 11-year-olds in 1969, we construct an index measuring girls' conformity to gender norms then prevalent in Britain. We link this index to outcomes over the life-cycle. Conditional on age-11 covariates, a one standard deviation increase in our index predicts a...

We document large differences in lifetime hours of work using data from the NLSY79 and argue that these differences are an important source of inequality in lifetime earnings. To establish this we develop and calibrate a rich heterogeneous agent model of labor supply and human capital...

We use an admissions lottery to estimate the effect of a non-means tested preschool program on students' long-run earnings, employment, family income, household formation, and geographic mobility. We observe long-run outcomes by linking both admitted and non-admitted individuals to confidential...