Topic Education

Berlin Macro Seminar

Life Events and Life Satisfaction: Estimating Effects of Multiple Life Events in Combined Models

How do life events affect life satisfaction? Previous studies focused on a single event or separate analyses of several events. However, life events are often grouped non-randomly over the lifespan, occur in close succession, and are causally linked, raising the question of how to best analyze them jointly. Here, we used representative German data (SOEP; N = 40,121individuals; n = 41,402 event occurrences) ...

Health of Parents, Their Children's Labor Supply, and the Role of Migrant Care Workers

We estimate the impact of parental health on adult children’s labor market out- comes. We focus on health shocks that increase care dependency abruptly. Our estimation strategy exploits the variation in the timing of shocks across treated families. Empirical results based on administrative data show a significant negative impact on the labor market activities of children. This effect is more pronounced for ...

An Economical Measure of Attitudes Towards Artificial Intelligence in Work, Healthcare, and Education (ATTARI-WHE)

Artificial intelligence (AI) has profoundly transformed numerous facets of both private and professional life. Understanding how people evaluate AI is crucial for predicting its future adoption and addressing potential barriers. However, existing instruments measuring attitudes towards AI often focus on specific technologies or cross-domain evaluations, while domain-specific measurement instruments ...

Age and Cognitive Skills: Use It or Lose It

Cross-sectional age-skill profiles suggest that cognitive skills start declining by age 30 if not earlier. If accurate, such age-driven skill losses pose a major threat to the human capital of societies with rapidly aging populations. We estimate actual age-skill profiles from individual changes in literacy and numeracy skills at different ages. We use the unique German longitudinal component of the ...

Mortality Inequality in Chile

This paper analyses trends in mortality inequality in 330 Chilean communes from 1990 to 2010 for different age groups and both genders. Chile had substantial inequalities in local-level mortality rates in 1990 but by 2010 these disparities had significantly decreased, especially among infants, children and the elderly. The only exception was Chilean men aged 20–39, for whom inequality in mortality ...

Crowded-out? Changes in Informal Childcare during the Expansion of Formal Services in Germany

Informal childcare care by grandparents, other relatives or friends is an important source of support in many Western countries, including Germany. Yet the role of this type of care is often overlooked in accounts of social policies supporting families with children, which tend to focus on formal childcare. This article examines whether the large formal childcare expansion occurring in Germany in the ...

How Behavior and Motivation Mediate the Impact of School Absences on Achievement

This study investigates the mediating role of psychosocial factors, including behaviors and motivations, in the association between school absences and academic achievement. Using comprehensive longitudinal data from England, linking National Pupil Database (NPD) school register data with Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) survey data (N=7,204), the analysis explores the impact of absences at ages 12/13 ...

Does Having Daughters Affect Political Preferences? A High-Powered Meta-Analysis of Many Surveys

This study examines whether having daughters affects political preferences and if effects vary across European countries. We estimate effect sizes for 39 countries in the European Social Survey (n = 156,236) and aggregate estimates using random-effects meta-analysis, following a preregistered analysis plan. We find significant evidence that having daughters increases the preferences for gender equality ...

Wealth Inequality among Families in a Changing Demographic Landscape: Evidence from Germany, 1988–2017

The role of demographic change for wealth inequality remains underexplored. This study analyzes how shifts in population aging, immigration, partnership status, educational attainment, and female labor force participation influenced wealth inequality in West Germany between 1988 and 2017, focusing on households with children. Our findings reveal that while overall wealth inequality remained stable, ...