Topic Education

Genetic Variants Linked to Education Predict Longevity

Educational attainment is associated with many health outcomes, including longevity. It is also known to be substantially heritable. Here, we used data from three large genetic epidemiology cohort studies (Generation Scotland, n = ∼17,000; UK Biobank, n = ∼115,000; and the Estonian Biobank, n = ∼6,000) to test whether education-linked genetic variants can predict lifespan length. We did so by using ...

Helping with the Kids? How Family-Friendly Workplaces Affect Parental Well-Being and Behavior

Despite political efforts, balancing work and family life is still challenging. This paper provides novel evidence on the effect of firm level interventions that seek to reduce the work-life conflict. The focus is on how a specific workplace policy, namely childcare support, affects the well-being, working time, and caring behavior of mothers with young children. We exploit the fact that since the ...

Between Life Cycle Model, Labor Market Integration and Discrimination: An Econometric Analysis of the Determinants of Return Migration

This paper studies the determinants of return migration by applying the Cox hazard model to longitudinal micro data from 1996 to 2012, including immigrants of a wide range of nationalities. The empirical results reveal the validity of the life cycle model of Migration Economics and a strong return probability decreasing effect of labor market integration and societal integration. Modeling non-proportional ...

Early Childhood Environment, Breastfeeding and the Formation of Preferences

This study provides insights on the role of early childhood family environment within the process of preference formation. We start by presenting evidence showing that breastfeeding duration is a valid measure of the quality of early childhood environment. In the main analysis, we then investigate how early childhood environment affects the formation of fundamental economic preferences such as time, ...

Assessing Risk Attitude: The Benefits of Pooling Measures

In Germany and many other countries, financial advisors are required by law to assess their clients’ risk preferences in order to help them make informed and appropriate investment decisions. Most institutions that provide financial advice - banks, for instance - carry out this assessment using just one type of risk measure. Financial advisors might ask clients to answer a question about their attitudes ...

Asking More Than One Question Is Key: Nine Questions to Lukas Menkhoff

The Development and Happiness of Very Young Children

The paper demonstrates how Sen’s (1985) alternative approach to welfare economics can be used to shed light on the wellbeing of very young children. More specifically, we estimate versions of the three key relations from his framework using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP, 2012) Survey. Our primary models provide evidence that skills are related to involvement in cognate activities ...

Financial Literacy: Thai Middle Class Women Do Not Lag behind

This research studies the stylized fact of a “gender gap” in that women tend to have lower financial literacy than men. Our data which samples middle-class people from Bangkok does not show a gender gap. This result is not explained by men’s low financial literacy, nor by women’s high income and good education. Rather, it seems influenced by country characteristics on general gender equality and finance-related ...

The Effect of Increasing Education Efficiency on University Enrollment: Evidence from Administrative Data and an Unusual Schooling Reform in Germany

We examine the consequences of compressing secondary schooling on students’ university enrollment. An unusual education reform in Germany reduced the length of academic high school while simultaneously increasing the instruction hours in the remaining years. Accordingly, students receive the same amount of schooling but over a shorter period of time, constituting an efficiency gain from an individual’s ...

The Impact of Lengthening the School Day on Substance Abuse and Crime: Evidence from a German High School Reform

In the 2000s, a major educational reform in Germany reduced the academic high school duration by one year while keeping constant the total number of instructional hours before graduation. The instructional hours from the eliminated school year shifted to lower grade levels, which increased the time younger students spend at school. This study explores the impact of the reform on youth crime rates and ...