Inheritance taxes may induce heirs to discontinue family firms. Because firm dissolution incurs transaction costs, a preferential tax treatment of transferred family businesses seems to be desirable from a macroeconomic viewpoint. The support of dynastic succession, however, entails also a cost...

Using a sample of Australians who display high rates of early school-leaving, we compare the trajectories of respondents who left school at each incremental age between 14 and 17 with respondents who left at 18 years old or more, in terms of homelessness, incarceration, substance use and mental...

What are the consequences of religious obligations conflicting with civic duties? We investigate this question by evaluating changes in the performance of practicing Muslim students when end-of-secondary-school exams and Ramadan overlapped in the Netherlands. Using administrative data on exam...

Using linked records from the 1880 to 1940 full-count United States decennial censuses, we estimate the effects of parental exposure to compulsory schooling (CS) laws on the human capital outcomes of children, exploiting the staggered roll-out of state CS laws in the late nineteenth and early...

I offer a way out of the Taubman-Goldberger controversy on the public policy (ir)relevance of heritability studies by arguing for a quasi-experimentally controlled comparison of the estimates that these studies provide. If the environments individuals are exposed to are under such control,...

We aim to disentangle the relative contributions of (i) cognitive ability, and (ii) education on health and mortality using a structural equation model suggested by Conti et al. (2010). We extend their model by allowing for a duration dependent variable, and an ordinal educational variable. Data...

In this paper we hypothesize that education is associated with a higher efficiency of health investment, yet that this efficiency advantage is solely driven by intelligence. We operationalize efficiency of health investment as the probability of dying conditional on a certain hospital diagnosis,...

We investigate whether later educational tracking reduced the intergenerational persistence of socioeconomic disparities in mortality in Finland,where the tracking age was raised from 11 to 16 in the 1970s. We use a difference-in-differences approach that exploits the gradual rollout of the...

In Germany, the streaming of students into an academic or nonacademic track at age 10 can be revised at later stages of secondary education. To investigate the importance of such revisions, we use administrative data on the student population in the German state of Hessen to measure the...