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We review studies of the impact of credit constraints on the accumulation of human capital. Evidence suggests that credit constraints have recently become important for schooling and other aspects of households' behavior. We highlight the importance of early childhood investments, since their response largely determines the impact of credit constraints on the overall lifetime acquisition of human capital. We also review the intergenerational literature and examine the macroeconomic impacts of credit constraints on social mobility and the income distribution. A common limitation across all areas of the human capital literature is the imposition of ad hoc constraints on credit. We propose a more careful treatment of the structure of government student loan programs and the incentive problems underlying private credit. We show that endogenizing constraints on credit for human capital helps explain observed borrowing, schooling, and default patterns and offers new insights about the design of government policy.

Floor constraints are a prominent feature of many matching markets, such as medical residency, teacher assignment, and military cadet matching. We develop a theory of matching markets under floor constraints. We introduce a stability notion, which we call floor respecting stability, for markets in which (hard) floor constraints must be respected. A matching is floor respecting stable if there is no coalition of doctors and hospitals that can propose an alternative matching that is feasible and an improvement for its members. Our stability notion imposes the additional condition that a coalition cannot reassign a doctor outside the coalition to another hospital (although she can be fired). This condition is necessary to guarantee the existence of stable matchings. We provide a mechanism that is strategy-proof for doctors and implements a floor respecting stable matching.