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The first chapter focuses on the skill accumulation of workers who have completed their formal education. Skills are acquired through work experience in the learning-by-doing (LBD) model. This model predicts that once hours of work are accounted for, there should be no systematic variation in wage growth. I use this prediction to test the LBD model by estimating, conditional on hours worked, the correlation between wage growth and variables affecting the incentives to accumulate skills. This correlation is found statistically significant and suggests a rejection of the LBD model for a sample of male and female workers from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) 1979.

The second chapter is co-authored with Lance Lochner. We use the NLSY 1979 and NLSY 1997 to estimate the effects of family income on educational attainment in the early 1980s and early 2000s. The effects of family income on college attendance increase substantially over this period. We develop an educational choice model that incorporates both borrowing constraints and a "consumption value" of schooling. The model cannot explain the rising effects of family income on college attendance in response to rising costs and returns to college without appealing to borrowing constraints.

The third chapter is co-authored with Marc Frenette and Lance Lochner. We conduct a parallel empirical analysis of the effects of parental income on post-secondary (PS) education attendance for recent high school cohorts in both the U.S. and Canada using data from the NLSY 1997 and Youth in Transition Survey. We estimate smaller post-secondary education attendance gaps by parental income in Canada relative to the U.S., even after controlling for family background and adolescent cognitive achievement. We develop an intergenerational schooling choice model that sheds light on the role of potentially import ant determinants of the family income - post-secondary education attendance gap. We document Canada - U.S. differences in financial returns to PS schooling, tuition policy, and financial aid, discussing the extent to which these differences contribute to the stronger family income - attendance relationship in the U.S.

To interpret our empirical findings on college attendance, we develop an educational choice model that incorporates both borrowing constraints and a 'consumption' value of schooling - two of the most commonly invoked explanations for a positive family income - schooling relationship. Without borrowing constraints, the model cannot explain the rising effects of family income on college attendance in response to the sharply rising costs and returns to college experienced from the early 1980s to early 2000s: the incentives created by a 'consumption' value of schooling imply that income should have become less important over time (or even negatively related to attendance). Instead, the data are more broadly consistent with the hypothesis that more youth are borrowing constrained today than were in the early 1980s.