Topic Education

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 ...

Long-term effects of civic education on political participation in East Germany

In the Shadow of Brothers: Unintended Impacts of a School Entry Policy on Migrant Girls

Siblings are the ultimate peers, deeply shaping one another’s development. Do these influences vary with a family’s cultural background? I estimate how sibling spillovers differ for girls and boys with older brothers or sisters in migrant and native families, using a regression discontinuity design on high-quality administrative data. Exploiting exogenous variation in older siblings’ achievement...

From friends to ‘family’: schools, neighborhoods, and gang recruitment

This paper examines how gang-related criminal behavior spreads through extended family and peer networks, using newly linked Swedish administrative data covering over 18,000 individuals with confirmed gang affiliation. Within-family correlations reveal intergenerational transmission of criminal behavior where parental criminal history accounts for only half of a broader latent "crime-family"...

Timing of School Entry and Personality Traits in Adulthood

This paper investigates the long-run consequences of a later school entry for personality traits. For identification, we exploit the statutory cutoff rules for school enrollment in Germany within a regression discontinuity design. We find that relatively older school starters have persistently lower levels of neuroticism in adulthood. This effect is entirely driven by women, which has important...

Negative labor supply shock and firms (joint with Peter Haan, Johannes Geyer, Jan Nimczik)

Part I: Lars Felder, "Negative labor supply shock and firms" (Joint with Peter Haan, Johannes Geyer, Jan Nimczik) In times of an increasing scarcity of workers, Germany has in a rare move decreased the retirement age for a sizeable section of the working force. This paper investigates the effect of this negative labor supply shock on firm and individual level outcomes using matched employer...

Long-Term Gains of Graduating in a Recession for Low Educated Entrants

Economic conditions at time of labor market entry have been shown to have large negative effects on labor market outcomes for an extended period of time. The immediate effects have been shown to be worse for lower educated entrants. In the long run, the effects may be very different as low and high educated have different possibilities to accommodate this negative shock, high educated entrants can...

Geographic Labor Mobility and Statutory Minimum Wages

I exploit the German statutory minimum wage introduction in 2015 to estimate its effects on geographic labor mobility using a 2% sample of administrative data. I find an increase in out-migration due to the minimum wage of low-skilled workers with migrant background from counties where a high-share of workers is subject to the minimum wage to urban labor market regions. The increase in out...