Among U.S. women born 1957–64, 63% of the lowest cognitive-skill quartile give birth before 22, against 18% of the highest. The gap is in unintended births, opens in high school, survives family background. In a life-cycle model where skills shift adherence—reliability of use—beyond wages and schooling, common adherence is rejected: it fits neither first-birth timing by skill nor within-method failure. Equalizing adherence cuts births by 21 by 16%, mostly for low-skill women; removing contraception’s cost does nearly as much, but its gains go to the high-skilled. Adding a long-acting method matches the fall in births Colorado’s program achieved.

The U.S. teen birth rate fell by roughly three-quarters between its 1991 peak and the early 2020s, one of the most dramatic demographic shifts of the period. This paper asks which economic mechanisms drove the decline and how they interacted. I estimate a dynamic life-cycle model of schooling, work, marriage, and fertility separately on two cohorts of women—the NLSY79 (teens in the late 1970s and early 1980s) and the NLSY97 (teens around 2000)—that together span the bulk of the decline. Comparing the estimated model across cohorts, I decompose the change in early childbearing into the contributions of distinct economic primitives, including the returns to schooling and work, the cost and effectiveness of fertility control, schooling costs, the marriage market, and preferences for children. By isolating the primitives behind early childbearing, the analysis contributes to explaining the causes of the broader decline in fertility in the United States and elsewhere.

I study how parental altruism shapes investment in college. Altruistic parents support children when resources are low, financing college and insuring income risk but—because they cannot commit to withholding support—creating a Samaritan’s dilemma. College disciplines it where cash cannot, by permanently raising the child’s income. In matched parent–child data, parents of college children consume about 8% more (roughly $2,500 a year) yet transfer about a fifth less often—the signature of releasing the precautionary resources held to stand ready to help. I quantify the mechanism in a continuous-time dynastic model estimated by simulated method of moments. The inability to commit distorts the college decision unevenly: it raises attendance for low-ability children (by 13–18 percentage points), for whom anticipated support makes college affordable, but lowers it for the medium- and high-ability (by up to 27 points), who can lean on the parent’s lifetime safety net instead of investing to become self-sufficient—a small net decline. The same transfers that distort the college margin also insure children, so severing the relationship to remove the dilemma—through a one-time transfer—lowers welfare for both parent and child, about 12% for the dynasty; only full commitment, which removes the dilemma while preserving insurance, raises dynastic welfare (+15%), and it does so by reallocating from child to parent rather than as a Pareto improvement. Free college operates through the same relationship: it reallocates resources to the child (about +5%) rather than financing many new entrants, leaving the dynasty roughly neutral.

We analyze the general equilibrium effects of human capital misallocation in Chile. First, we utilize tax and educational records to estimate the proportion of educationally mismatched individuals (high-ability individuals with low educational attainment). Second, we estimate the labor market returns on ability, education, and human capital investment. Finally, we construct and calibrate a dynastic overlapping generations model with both private and public human capital investment to decompose the causes of educational mismatch and the general equilibrium effects of changes in sorting.

Why do selective universities not expand their number of slots, and how do the returns to degrees differ by program quality? Using Chilean administrative data on university admissions, enrollment, and earnings, we estimate the returns to crossing admission cutoffs and how they depend on the quality gap to the student’s next-best option, and the effect of program capacity on students who are not at the margin. We then build a general-equilibrium model of major choice in which expanding or discouraging majors moves wages for everyone, to study the benefit of an additional slot that schools do not internalize.

We study how oil price shocks propagate across sectors in a small open economy. Using Chilean data, we document the response of sectoral prices to oil price shocks and relate it to sectors’ direct and indirect exposure to oil through input–output linkages. We then build and estimate a multi-sector New Keynesian model with the Chilean input–output structure, in which households also buy fuel directly, to ask what production networks add to the transmission of oil shocks to core and headline inflation and to activity, and how much of the amplification comes from intermediate input intensity rather than from the network’s topology."

We study how employment concentration in local labor markets relates to firm pay in Chilean matched employer–employee data for 2005–2019. Local labor markets are constructed from job-to-job flows using hierarchical agglomerative clustering, and concentration is instrumented with the leave-one-out mean of the log inverse number of employers in the same sector in other locations. We decompose the earnings–concentration coefficient exactly into worker composition, the marginal product of labor, and wage markdowns, to assess how much of the relationship reflects labor market power.

We use the Penn Wharton Budget Model’s microsimulation of U.S. demographics projections to construct estimates of the U.S. federal fiscal and generational imbalances. The federal government’s fiscal imbalance (FI) calculated under current fiscal laws and purchases policies over the next 75 years equals $93.8 trillion, which is 7.0 percent of the present value of projected GDP (PVGDP) over that time horizon. Calculated in perpetuity, FI equals $202.9 trillion, which is 8.2 percent of PVGDP, also calculated in perpetuity. The FI/PVGDP ratio in perpetuity would be 9.4 percent under extension of provisions that are scheduled to expire under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.

We find that, after the adoption of the euro, the European Central Bank has followed a forward-looking Taylor rule. This rule is such that nominal as well as real short-term interest rates increase in response to higher expected inflation or decline in output. Our findings show that the European Central Bank policy responses are of the same magnitude and sign as the ones prevailing in the pre-euro era for Germany, France, and Italy. We conclude that, before and after the euro, central banks in Europe have adopted a proactive stance towards controlling inflation.