9511955 Behrman The principal objective of this project is to improve understanding of the determinants of human capital investments and intergenerational financial transfers and their consequences for the level of and changes in the inequality in earnings and income. The project develops and tests models that incorporate family behavior, endowment inequality within and among families, and interactions between family resources and opportunities for post-secondary schooling. The project investigates issues of bias and potential bias in estimates obtained using standard cross-sectional, sibling and twins estimators, the role and importance of measurement errors, and the effects of unmeasured shocks differentiating human capital investments among siblings, net of endowment differences. The models will be applied to a newly-collected large-scale survey data set describing identical twins, their spouses, their children and their parents using a questionnaire designed specifically to elicit information relevant to the project s objectives within family and life-cycle contexts. More specifically, the project will yield estimates of (1) endowment effects on human capital investments - measured by time in school, school quality, and work experience - and financial transfers between adults and their parents, (2) how such effects varied across cohorts with different college and labor market opportunities, (3) differences in such investment determinants across men and women and by family background, and (4) the consequences of these interactions among endowments, family behavior, family resource constraints and schooling opportunities fort the distributions of earnings and income. The investigations will also help determine the value of twins data in social science research, which is currently imperfectly understood. The project will also produce a public-use data set from the new survey data.
