Background Reading

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This article studies the effect of graduating from college on lifetime earnings. We develop a quantitative model of college choice with uncertain graduation. Departing from much of the literature, we model in detail how students progress through college.

A negative relationship between income and fertility has persisted for so long that its existence is often taken for granted. One economic theory builds on this relationship and argues that rising inequality leads to greater differential fertility between rich and poor.

In this article, we provide novel survey evidence on middle schoolers' knowledge and on how such knowledge evolves in the process of high school track choice.

This paper is motivated by the fact that nearly half of U.S. college students drop out without earning a bachelor's degree. Its objective is to quantify how much uncertainty college entrants face about their graduation outcomes. To do so, we develop a quantitative model of college choice.

The English structural transformation from farming to manufacturing was accompanied by rapid technological change, expansion of trade, and massive population growth.

Predicting group decisions under uncertainty requires disentangling individual members' utilities over the consequences of choice, their expectations for uncertain outcomes, and their choice process as a group.

n this article, we consider the collection of novel subjective data on family processes of schooling decisions.

Mulligan and Rubinstein (2008) (MR) argued that changing selection of working females on unobservable characteristics, from negative in the 1970s to positive in the 1990s, accounted for nearly the entire closing of the gender wage gap.

Fertility in the United States rose from a low of 2.27 children for women born in 1908 to a peak of 3.21 children for women born in 1932. It dropped to a new low of 1.74 children for women born in 1949, before stabilizing for subsequent cohorts.

At the end of the 1960s, the U.S. divorce law underwent major changes and the divorce rate almost doubled in all of the states.

We construct a marriage market model of matching along multiple dimensions, some of which are unobservable, in which individual preferences can be summarized by a one-dimensional index combining the various characteristics.

Within the inferential context of predicting a distribution of potential outcomes P[y(t)] under a uniform treatment assignment t in T, this paper deals with partial identification of the alpha-quantile of the distribution of interest Q_alpha[y(t)] under relatively weak and credible monotonicity-t

The consumption literature uses adult equivalence scales to measure individual-level inequality. This practice imposes the assumption that there is no within-household inequality.