Topic Education

Health Effects on Children's Willingness to Compete

The formation of human capital is important for a society's welfare and economic success. Recent literature shows that child health can provide an important explanation for disparities in children's human capital development across different socio-economic groups. While this literature focuses on cognitive skills as determinants of human capital, it neglects non-cognitive skills. We analyze data from ...

How Far Do Children Move? Spatial Distances after Leaving the Parental Home

Little is known about how far young adults move when they leave their parental home initially. We addressed this question using data from ten waves (2000 - 2009) of the German Socioeconomic Panel Study on spatial distances calculated by the geo-coordinates of residential moves (N = 1,425). Linear regression models predicted young adults· moving distance by factors at the individual, family, household, ...

Long-Run Consequences of Natural Disasters: Evidence from Tangshan

Exploiting Tangshan 1976 - the deadliest earthquake in the 20th century - as a source of exogenous variation, we estimate the long-run effect of a historical shock on contemporary socio-economic outcomes. Cohorts born after the earthquake were not only larger, but exhibit lower school completion rates, particularly among the female today. Despite lower schooling levels, there is no evidence for adverse ...

The Bigger the Children, the Bigger the Worries: Are Preschoolers and Adolescents Affected Differently by Family Instability with Regard to Non-cognitive Skills?

Substantial research on the relationship between family structures and child outcomes represents a considerable part of the literature. However, family structure provides a rather static view of the relationship of children's living arrangements and their well-being, revealing hardly anything about the stability of a family for a longer period. This paper focuses on the impact of family instability ...

Enrollment and Success in Higher Education: Structural Estimation and Simulation Evidence for Germany ; Dissertation

This thesis analyzes the determinants of university enrollment and successful completion of university studies. The main questions analyzed are: What are the enrollment effects of different tuition fee schemes? How does taxation of future earnings affect enrollment? What is the impact of student aid on the success of studies? To answer the first two questions, I develop a structural university enrollment ...

Family Location and Caregiving Patterns from an International Perspective

This paper conducts a cross-national econometric analysis of intra-family location and caregiving patterns. First, we assess, from an international perspective, the relationship between family structure and the geographic proximity between adult children and their parents. We then examine whether differences in family structure affect the amount of informal care adult children provide to their elderly ...

Pollution Exposure and Infant Health: Evidence from Germany

African Leaders: Their Education Abroad and FDI Flows

Leaders are critical to a country's success. They can influence domestic policy via specific measures that they enforce, and they can also influence international public opinion towards their country. Foreign Direct Investments are also essential for a country's economic growth. Our hypothesis is that foreign-educated leaders attract more FDI to their country. Our rationale is that education obtained ...

Parental Risk Attitudes and Children's Secondary School Track Choice

It is well known that individuals' risk attitudes are related to behavioral outcomes such as smoking, portfolio decisions, and also educational attainment, but there is barely any evidence on whether parental risk attitudes affect the educational attainment of dependent children. We add to this literature and examine children's secondary school track choice in Germany where tracking occurs at age ten ...

Does Employer Learning Vary by Occupation?

Models in which employers learn about the productivity of young workers, such as Altonji and Pierret (2001), have two principal implications: First, the distribution of wages becomes more dispersed as a cohort of workers gains experience; second, the coefficient on a variable that employers initially do not observe, such as the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) score, grows with experience. If ...