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We measure college graduate quality—the average human capital of a college’s graduates—for graduates from 2,800 colleges in 48 countries. Graduates of colleges in the richest countries have 50% more human capital than graduates of colleges in the poorest countries. Migration reinforces these differences: emigrants from poorer countries are highly positively selected on human capital. Finally, we show that these stocks and flows matter for growth and development by showing that college graduate quality predicts the share of a college’s students who become inventors, engage in entrepreneurship, and become top executives both within and across countries.

We measure the contribution of firm-embedded productivity to cross-country income differences. By firm-embedded productivity we refer to firm-specific components of productivity, such as blueprints, management practices, and other intangible capital. Using micro-level data for multinational enterprises (MNEs), we compare market shares of the same MNE in different countries and document that they are systematically larger in less developed countries. This indicates that MNEs face less competition and that firm-embedded productivity is scarce in these countries. We implement a measure of firm-embedded productivity based on this observation. Differences in firm-embedded productivity account for one-third of the cross-country variance in output per worker in our sample.

Generous maternity leave, affordable daycare, extensive social safety nets, excellent universal health care, and high-quality public schools, are all notable features of Nordic countries. There is a widespread belief that such strong public investments in children contribute to a levelled playing field and promote social mobility. However, gaps in learning outcomes between children of rich and poor parents remain as high in Nordic countries as elsewhere in Europe. One explanation for this paradox is that the equalizing impacts of public investments are undone by parental investments in children of rich and poor families, which are as unequal in Nordic countries as in the rest of the European continent.

This paper studies the extent to which the cyclicality of occupational mobility shapes that of aggregate unemployment and its duration distribution. We document the relation between workers' occupational mobility and unemployment duration over the long run and business cycle.

Using detailed household-level data from Malawi on physical quantities of agricultural outputs and inputs, we measure farm total factor productivity (TFP), controlling for land quality, rain, and transitory shocks. We find that operated land size and capital are essentially unrelated to farm TFP, implying substantial factor misallocation. The agricultural output gain from a reallocation of factors to their efficient use among existing farmers is a factor between 1.7- and 2.8-fold. We provide suggestive evidence connecting misallocation with the extent of land markets and illustrate how an efficient allocation via rental markets can substantially reduce agricultural income inequality and poverty.

This paper quantifies employer market power in US manufacturing and how it has changed over time. Using administrative data, we estimate plant-level markdowns—the ratio between a plant's marginal revenue product of labor and its wage. We find most manufacturing plants operate in a monopsonistic environment, with an average markdown of 1.53, implying a worker earning only 65 cents on the marginal dollar generated. To investigate long-term trends for the entire sector, we propose a novel, theoretically grounded measure for the aggregate markdown. We find that it decreased between the late 1970s and the early 2000s, but has been sharply increasing since.

We quantitatively investigate the welfare costs of increasing tax revenues in low-income countries. We consider three tax instruments: consumption, labour income and capital income taxes. The analysis is based on a general equilibrium model featuring heterogeneous agents, incomplete financial markets, and rural and urban areas. We calibrate the model to Ethiopia and decompose the welfare costs into their aggregate and distributional components. We find that changing taxes alter the composition of demand. This, together with limited labour mobility, causes the incidence of higher taxes to fall disproportionately on the rural population, regardless of the instrument. Consumption taxes are the instrument with the largest welfare loss.

We develop Generational Wealth Accounts (GWA): the first set of balance sheets, by generations, to include all human capital, tangible wealth, financial wealth, and transfer wealth, and the uses to which these are put, and employ them to quantify inter-generational transfers and the sustainability of consumption. Consumption plans in the UK public sector worsened over the financial crisis and are unsustainable; private sector plans improved, and are now almost balanced. Increases in private capital transfers to the young offset the effect of increased public debt. House price increases shifted resources from young to old but had little effect on sustainability.

Technical change that extends market scale can generate winner-take-all dynamics, with large income growth among top earners. I test this "superstar model" in the entertainer labor market, where the historic rollout of television creates a natural experiment in scale-related technological change. The resulting inequality changes are consistent with superstar theory: the launch of a local TV station skews the entertainer wage distribution sharply to the right, with the biggest impact at the very top of the distribution, while negatively impacting workers below the star level. The findings provide evidence of superstar effects and distinguish such effects from popular alternative models.

We examine intergenerational mobility in the very long run, across generations that are six centuries apart. We exploit a unique dataset containing detailed information at the individual level for all people living in the Italian city of Florence in 1427. These individuals have been associated, using their surnames, with their pseudo-descendants living in Florence in 2011. We find that long-run earnings elasticity is about 0.04; we also find an even stronger role for real wealth inheritance and evidence of persistence in belonging to certain elite occupations. Our results are confirmed when we account for the quality of the pseudo-links and when we address the potential selectivity bias behind the matching process. Finally, we frame our results within the existing evidence and argue that the quasi-immobility of preindustrial society and the existence of multigenerational effects might explain the long-lasting effects of ancestors’ socioeconomic status.