Topic Education

The trickle-down effects of higher education affirmative action

A missed opportunity? Labor demand shocks and workforce diversity

We study how labor demand shocks affect workforce diversity in the absence of targeted diversity policies. Exploiting German reunification as a natural experiment, we analyze the academic labor market where nearly all social sciences professors in East Germany were replaced while STEM faculty remained largely unchanged. Using administrative data and a regional difference-in-differences design, we...

Personality in the Classroom: Interactions of Parental SES and Students’ Big Five in Predicting School Performance

While socioeconomic status (SES) and personality have both been identified as relevant predictors of academic achievement, little is known about their possible interplay in predicting school performance. The present study used the latent moderated structural equations (LMS) method to investigate latent interactions between familial SES and parent-rated Big Five in a sample of German high school students ...

Social Media: Population Favors Regulation—but Ban Only for Those up to the Age of 12

Social media usage by children and young people is an increasingly controversial topic. The focus is on risks, opportunities, and possible regulations. Politicians from all relevant parties are now open to a social media ban up to a certain age; the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs has set up a commission of experts. Based on a short survey in the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), conducted in September ...

Beyond Overall Income Inequality: Racial Income Gaps and Health Disparities

In this paper, we combine Census data with death records to examine the relationship between income inequality and race-specific mortality across 5,565 municipalities in Brazil. We find that overall income inequality is strongly associated with Non-White mortality but not with White mortality. To understand this disparity, we decompose the Gini coefficient and find that the racial income gap accounts ...

The Early Bird Gets the Germs? The Impact of Early Daycare Attendance on Children’s Health

In recent decades, the share of very young children in daycare has significantly increased in many OECD countries, including Germany. Despite the critical role of child health in development and later life success, the impact of early daycare attendance on health has received little attention in the economic literature. This study examines the effects of a substantial daycare expansion in Germany on ...

The Generational Gift: The Effects of Grandparental Care on the Next Generations' Health and Well‐Being

Health and well‐being in the family context can be affected by care giving arrangements. Following parental care and daycare, grandparents are the third most important care givers for children in many Western societies. Despite the relevance of grandparental care, there is little evidence on the causal effects of this care mode on the next generations' health and well‐being. In this paper, we fill ...

Child Penalties in Labour Market Skills

This paper estimates child penalties in labour-market-relevant cognitive skills, such as numeracy but also literacy and problem-solving competencies. We use international PIAAC data and adapt a pseudo-panel approach to a single cross-section covering 29 countries. Numeracy scores, which are associated with the largest returns to skills and pronounced gender differences, decline by 0.11 standard deviations ...

Parent-child Mismatches in Educational Aspirations: Prevalence, Stability, and Convergence over time

Life-course scholarship has documented the important role of educational aspirations in status attainment processes but has also revealed that parent-child mismatches in educational aspirations may negatively affect child development. However, it is unclear how parent-child mismatches in educational aspirations evolve over time. Here, we examine (1) the prevalence of mismatching aspirations across ...

Patience and Subnational Differences in Human Capital: Regional Analysis with Facebook Interests

Decisions to invest in human capital depend on people's time preferences. This paper shows that differences in patience are closely related to substantial subnational differences in educational achievement, leading to new perspectives on longstanding within-country disparities. We use social-media data – Facebook interests – to construct novel regional measures of patience within Italy and the United ...