We examine changes in the characteristics of American youth between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, with a focus on characteristics that matter for labor market success. The current generation is more skilled than the previous one. Blacks and Hispanics have gained relative to whites, and women have gained relative to men. However, the skill distribution has widened overall. Shifts in parental education generate many of the observed changes. We also provide speculative estimates suggesting that if recent trends in technology and the supply of human capital continue, wage inequality will increase substantially by 2025.

This paper studies the effect of improved early life health care on mortality and long-run academic achievement in school. We use the idea that medical treatments often follow rules of thumb for assigning care to patients, such as the classification of Very Low Birth Weight (VLBW ), which assigns infants special care at a specific birth weight cutoff. Using detailed administrative data on schooling and birth records from Chile and Norway, we establish that children who receive extra medical care at birth have lower mortality rates and higher test scores and grades in school. These gains are in the order of 0.15–0.22 standard deviations.

This paper explores the relationship among health at birth, academic outcomes, and the potential role of parental investments using administrative panel data from Chile. Using detailed data on parental investments, we find that investments are compensatory regarding initial health, but not across twins. Twins fixed effects models estimate a persistent effect of birth weight on academic achievement, while ordinary least squares and siblings fixed effects models find this relationship to decline over time. We view these findings in the context of a model of human capital accumulation where parental investments respond to initial endowments and spill over to siblings.