Topic Education

Use It or Lose It: How Cognitive Skills Change with Age

Use It or Lose It: How Cognitive Skills Change with Age

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 ...

The Educational Wealth Divide in Europe: Post-Secondary Enrollment Gaps Across Parental Wealth Components and Countries

Parental wealth is a crucial dimension of socioeconomic status (SES) and plays a significant role in the intergenerational transmission of educational advantage. Previous research on the topic has been limited to a small number of countries, and findings on the relationship between parental wealth and educational attainment are hardly comparable across institutional contexts. Furthermore, the specific ...

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 ...

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 ...

Parental Leave Policy and Long-run Earnings of Mothers: Online Appendix (2022)

Paid parental leave schemes have been shown to increase women's employment rates but to decrease their wages in case of extended leave duration. In view of these potential trade-offs, many countries are discussing the optimal design of parental leave policies. We analyze the impact of a major parental leave reform on mothers' long-term earnings. The 2007 German parental leave reform replaced a means-tested ...

Thanks, but No Thanks: A Microsimulation of BAföG Eligibility and Non-Take-Up

While the body of literature on the non-take-up of public aid has grown substantially in recent years, a notable gap remains in the literature of non-take-up rates for student aid programs, where research is still extremely limited. This paper examines the non-take-up rate of Germany’s federal student aid program BAföG by creating a microsimulation based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel ...

Does the Impact of Pupil Absences on Achievement Depend on Their Timing?

Using linked data from the Millennium Cohort Study and National Pupil Database (N = 8,139), this study examined how the timing of school absences (years 1 to 11 between 2006 and 2017) affects achievement at the end of compulsory schooling in England. Absences during any school year are harmful to student achievement. However, absences in years 1 and 6 (the final year of primary school), and between ...