We use a hypothetical choice methodology to estimate preferences for workplace attributes from a sample of high-ability undergraduates attending a highly selective university. We estimate that women on average have a higher willingness to pay (WTP) for jobs with greater work flexibility and job stability, and men have a higher WTP for jobs with higher earnings growth. These job preferences relate to college major choices and to actual job choices reported in a follow-up survey four years after graduation. The gender differences in preferences explain at least a quarter of the early career gender wage gap.

In this paper, we study the process of children’s skill formation using a dynamic latent factor model to identify key features of the skill production function. We develop and estimate a joint dynamic process for latent investment and skill development, incorporating both static and dynamic complementarities between parental investments and children’s skills in the technology of skill formation. Our analysis of US data reveals that early childhood investments (age 5–6) are highly effective for cognitive skill development, with greater marginal productivity for children with lower existing skills. This suggests that targeting interventions at disadvantaged young children is most beneficial.

We conducted a survey of high-ability college students and elicited beliefs about how their choice of major, and of whether to complete their degree, would affect an array of future events: earnings, employment, marriage prospects, potential spousal characteristics, and fertility. We find that students perceive large “returns” to human capital not only in their own future earnings but also in other dimensions (e.g., potential spouse’s earnings and fertility). We find evidence of students sorting into majors on the basis of these perceived returns. Family expectations are particularly important for female students’ major choices. In a follow-up survey conducted 6 years after the initial data collection, we find a close connection between expectations and current realizations.

We show how a discrete instrument can be used to identify the marginal treatment effects under a functional structure that allows for treatment heterogeneity among individuals with the same observed characteristics and self-selection based on the unobserved gain from treatment. Guided by this identification result, we perform a marginal treatment effect analysis of the interaction between the quantity and quality of children. Our estimates reveal that the family size effects vary in magnitude and even sign and that families act as if they possess some knowledge of the idiosyncratic effects in the fertility decision.

We construct a dynamic model of child development where forward-looking parents and children jointly take actions to increase the child’s cognitive and noncognitive skills within a Markov perfect equilibrium framework. In addition to time and money investments in their child, parents also choose whether to use explicit incentives to increase the child’s self-investment, which may reduce the child’s future intrinsic motivation to invest by reducing the child’s discount factor. We use the estimated model parameters to show that the use of extrinsic motivation has large costs in terms of the child’s future incentives to invest in themselves.