Working Papers

Who Benefits Most from Parental Investment? Heterogeneous Returns and Credit Constraints in a Nonlinear Model of Skill Formation

Working paper

This paper estimates the technology of skill formation from birth through adolescence using data from the Children of the NLSY79. I incorporate discrete proxy measurement into a latent factor framework, showing that treating binary and Likert scale proxies as continuous — standard practice in this literature — substantially biases production function estimates. Combining this with recent results on normalization and identification, I estimate how returns to parental investment vary across the child skill distribution, along with equations predicting parental investment, across seven developmental periods. Both cognitive and noncognitive skills are strongly persistent and parental influence declines sharply with age. Paradoxically, inputs to cognitive production are complements, yet low cognitive skill children face the highest marginal returns to investment because they receive substantially less of it. Permanent income predicts parental investment, but current income and credit constraints do not.

Migration, Equality of Opportunity, and Interpreting Intergenerational Mobility (2025)

MA Thesis, working paper

In this paper, I focus on a narrow but clearly defined dimension of opportunity: the cost of migrating out of your birthplace. I find that the theoretical relationship between migration costs and intergenerational mobility depends heavily on the distribution of those costs. A reduction in migration costs may reduce upward mobility rates. I find some correlational evidence consistent with this model and propose a causal strategy using a novel "pull factors" exogenous shifter using data from the NSLY97, NSLY79, Opportunity Insights, and the Wharton Residential Land Use Regulation Index.

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