Topic Education

Fathers’ Parental Leave-Taking, Childcare Involvement and Mothers’ Labor Market Participation

This study analyzes the effect of fathers’ parental leave-taking on the time fathers spend with their children and on mothers’ and fathers’ labor supply. Fathers’ leave-taking is highly selective and the identification of causal effects relies on within-father differences in leave-taking for first and higher order children that were triggered by a policy reform promoting more gender equality in leave-taking. ...

Flipping a Coin: Evidence from University Applications

We empirically investigate the possibility that a decision maker prefers to avoid making a decision and instead delegates it to an external device, e.g., a coin flip. A large data set from the centralized clearinghouse for university admissions in Germany shows a choice pattern of applicants that is consistent with coin flipping and that entails substantial consequences for the matching outcome. In ...

Like Father, Like Son? – A Comparison of Absolute and Relative Intergenerational Labour Income Mobility in Germany and the US

Are children better off than their parents? This highly debated question in politics and economics is investigated by analysing the trends in absolute and relative intergenerational labour income mobility for Germany and the US. High quality panel data is used for this purpose; the SOEP for Germany and the PSID for the US. In Germany, 67 per cent of sons born between 1955 and 1975 earned a significantly ...

Refugees in Germany with Children Still Living Abroad Have Lowest Life Satisfaction

Family strongly influences personal well-being—especially in the case of refugees, whose family members often remain in their homeland. This report is the first to closely examine the well-being and family structures of refugees who came to Germany between January 2013 and January 2016. It uses data from the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees in Germany. Among individuals aged between 18 and 49, nine ...

Class Rank and Long-Run Outcomes

This paper considers a fundamental question about the school environment – what are the long run effects of a student’s ordinal rank in elementary school? Using administrative data from all public school students in Texas, we show that students with a higher third grade academic rank, conditional on ability and classroom effects, have higher subsequent test scores, are more likely to take AP classes, ...

Extreme Weather Events Drastically Reduce School Completion by Mongolian Children

As climate change progresses, extreme weather events are occurring more often, with developing countries suffering the brunt. Using Mongolia as an example, this study examines how extremely cold and snowy winters—which lead to high livestock mortality and thus threaten the livelihood of many households—impact children’s school completion. The results, based on a representative household survey conducted ...

Gene Discovery and Polygenic Prediction from a Genome-Wide Association Study of Educational Attainment in 1.1 Million Individuals

Here we conducted a large-scale genetic association analysis of educational attainment in a sample of approximately 1.1 million individuals and identify 1,271 independent genome-wide-significant SNPs. For the SNPs taken together, we found evidence of heterogeneous effects across environments. The SNPs implicate genes involved in brain-development processes and neuron-to-neuron communication. In a separate ...

Convergence or Divergence? Educational Discrepancies in Work-Care Arrangements of Mothers with Young Children in Germany

This study examines how educational differences in work-care patterns among mothers with young children in Germany changed between 1997 and 2013. Since the mid-2000s, Germany has undergone a paradigm shift in parental leave and childcare policies. Our comparative analysis of East and West Germany provides new evidence on whether the long-standing gender regime differences interact with recent developments ...

Active Learning Improves Financial Education: Experimental Evidence

We conduct a randomized field experiment to study the effects of two financial education interventions offered to small-scale retailers in Uganda. The treatments contrast "active learning" with "traditional lecturing" within standardized lesson-plans. We find that active learning has a positive and economically meaningful impact on savings and investment outcomes, in contrast to insignificant impacts ...

The Effects of Education on Health: An Intergenerational Perspective