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Lecture 7 Demand for Education

[SQUEAKING] [RUSTLING] [CLICKING] ESTHER DUFLO: Today I want to switch back to empirical-- to examining empirical things. You guys have read my paper. I'm going to talk a bit about that. And I'm going to talk also about it on Monday. So some of the questions that you had-- many of the questions, comments you had were on the returns to education piece. And those we'll discuss on Monday. But there are a number of things that come up that I should be able to address today. So if you remember, we ended up last time by saying-- or we at some point last-- on Monday, we had this equation that the level of education chosen by a family for their kids is going to be a function of the cost of education, the marginal cost for them of acquiring one more unit of human capital, and of the returns to education, both the immediate financial return in the form of wages as well as the human-- how is it going to acquire the human capital of the next generation. So these are all t...

Lecture 6 Investing in Human Capital Theory

[SQUEAKING] [RUSTLING] [CLICKING] ESTHER DUFLO: So I hope you enjoyed Frank's lecture on behavioral economics. We have put them early in the semester this year because the insight are going to keep coming back because, of course, they apply to any topic. But in some sense, today is going to be a bit of a fall back to much more neoclassical territory because I do want some time talking about the model that, in a sense, was the workhorse model, still is the workhorse model of how to think about human capital investment decision. And then once we know that model, we can think about what everything is wrong about it. But it's a good place to start. So I'm going to take one embodiment of that model, which is from a paper by Abhijit, which is sort of a review paper. But it's a very classical and commonly-used model. So you could call it the Barro-Becker human capital investment model. And the question it's trying to ask is how human capital investment decisi...