Topic Education

The Impact of Extreme Weather Events on Children’s Height: Evidence from Mongolia

Shocks experienced during early childhood can harm the long term growth of children. We examine the potential impact of extreme weather events on children’s height,taking the example of Mongolia, which is frequently plagued by extreme winters. Our focus is on the unusually harsh winter of 2009/10, which caused the deaths of over 10 million animals, approximately 23.9 percent of the country’s entire ...

Extreme Winters Affect Children’s Height: Six Questions to Kati Krähnert

Forced Displacement Detrimental to the Health of Children in Colombia

Colombia has the highest number of internally displaced refugees in the world after Syria. The decade-long ongoing armed conflict between the Colombian police and the armed forces, paramilitaries, and guerilla groups has caused 5.7 million people—more than ten percent of the population—to flee their homelands. Many of them are women and children, driven off their lands, in most cases, to the misery ...

Impact of Education Programs in Colombian Conflict Areas: Children Attend School More Frequently But Performance Has Barely Improved

Policy programs in developing countries aimed at supporting certain sectors of the population in individual areas play a crucial role in development cooperation. Examples include programs to improve access to education. But what impact do such programs really have? The present study by DIW Berlin examines the impact of a welfare program on the learning success and participation of children in Colombian ...

Risks and Returns to Educational Fields: A Financial Asset Approach to Vocational and Academic Education

Applying a financial assets approach, we analyze the returns and earnings risk of investments into different types of human capital. Even though the returns from investing in human capital are extensively studied, little is known about the properties of the returns to different types of human capital within a given educational path. Using information from the German Micro Census, we estimate the risk ...

The Impact of Education on Personality: Evidence from a German High School Reform

This paper investigates the short-term effects of a reduction in the length of high school on students' personality traits using a school reform carried out at the state level in Germany as a quasi-natural experiment. Starting in 2001, academic-track high school (Gymnasium) was reduced from nine to eight years in most of Germany's federal states, leaving the overall curriculum unchanged. This enabled ...

Early Birds in Day Care: The Social Gradient in Starting Day Care and Children's Non-cognitive Skills

In recent years, almost all children below school age in Western industrialized countries have some experience of attending day care institutions. However, the age at which children enter day care and therefore the overall time spent in day carevaries substantially. We investigate the potential impact of later day care entry on the social and emotional behaviour of children, one important aspect of ...

Maternity Leave and Its Consequences for Subsequent Careers in Germany

This paper analyzes the wage development of mothers interrupting their careers, in comparison to the wages of men who do not face a parental interruption. We estimate OLS regression models for different subcategories defined by age and point in time. We use data from the German Socioeconomic Panel from 1984 to 2011, to show that wages and the financial penalty for maternity differ according to the ...

The Impact of Displacement on Child Health: Evidence from Colombia's DHS 2010

This paper investigates the causal impact of displacement on health outcomes for Colombian children of different age cohorts. It uses the Colombian Demographic and Health Survey 2010, which provides both a number of health outcomes and information about displacement of households. Two different empirical strategies are employed to identify the impact of displacement on child health, namely a linear ...

Remittances and the Human Capital of Children: New Evidence from Kyrgyzstan during Revolution and Financial Crisis, 2005–2009

We analyze the effect of the receipt of remittances on the education and health of children in Kyrgyzstan during a volatile period of their recent history, 2005–2009. The country experienced revolution in 2005 and the global financial crisis beginning in 2008. Both events impact human capital investment, and the changes vary by region of the country. We use fixed effects estimation and fixed effects, ...