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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 ...

Patience and the North-South Divide in Student Achievement in Italy and the United States

Birth Cohort Size Variation and the Estimation of Class Size Effects

We show that in school systems with grade retention or redshirting birth cohort size is negatively related to the grade-level share of students who are too old for their grade. This compositional effect gives rise to an upward bias in estimates of class size effects based on commonly used research designs exploiting within-school variation in birth cohort size. Using data for all primary schools in ...

Schooling and Self-Control

While there is an established positive relationship between self-control and education, the direction of causality remains a matter of debate. We make a contribution to resolving this issue by exploiting a series of Australian and German educational reforms that increased minimum education requirements as a source of exogenous variation in education levels. Instrumental variables estimates suggest ...

Reconsidering Inequalities in COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake in Germany: A Spatiotemporal Analysis Combining Individual Educational Level and Area-Level Socioeconomic Deprivation

Combining the frameworks of fundamental causes theory and diffusion of innovation, scholars had anticipated a delayed COVID-19 vaccination uptake for people in lower socioeconomic position depending on the socioeconomic context. We qualify these propositions and analyze educational differences in COVID-19 vaccination status over the first ten months of Germany’s vaccination campaign in 2021. Data from ...

Does Family Structure Account for Child Achievement Gaps by Parental Education? Findings for England, France, Germany and the United States

This paper explores the role of family trajectories during childhood in explaining inequalities by maternal education in children's math and reading skills using harmonized, longitudinal, and nationally representative surveys, which follow children over the course of primary and lower secondary school in four high-income countries (England, France, Germany, and the United States). As single parenthood ...

Cross-national Differences in Socioeconomic Achievement Inequality in Early Primary School: The Role of Parental Education and Income in Six Countries

This paper presents comparative information on the strength of the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and literacy skills at ages 6–8, drawing on data from France, Germany, Japan, Rotterdam (Netherlands), the United Kingdom, and the United States. We investigate whether the strength of the association between SES and literacy skills in early-to-mid childhood depends on the operationalization ...

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 ...

The Implications of Pupil Rank for Achievement

The significance of social interaction has become an increasingly important part of economic thought and models through the work on peer effects, social norms, and networks. Within this literature, a novel focus of ranking within groups has emerged. The rank of an individual is usually defined as the ordinal position within a specific group. This could be the work environment or a classroom, and much ...

Trajectories of School Absences across Compulsory Schooling and Their Impact on Children’s Academic Achievement: An Analysis Based on Linked Longitudinal Survey and School Administrative Data

Prior research has identified that school absences harm children’s academic achievement. However, this literature is focused on brief periods or single school years and does not consistently account for the dynamic nature of absences across multiple school years. This study examined dynamic trajectories of children’s authorised and unauthorised absences throughout their compulsory school career in ...