In this paper we investigate the causal effect of years of schooling on health and health-related behavior in West Germany. We apply an instrumental variables approach using as natural experiments several changes in compulsory schooling laws between 1949 and 1969. These law changes generate...

Using German census data we estimate the causal effect of education on smoking and overweight/obesity using the abolition of secondary school fees as instrumental variable. The West German federal states enacted this reform at different dates after World War II generating exogenous variation in...

We use newly available data from Germany to study the relationship between parental income and child health. We find a strong gradient between parental income and subjective child health as has been documented earlier in the US, Canada and the UK. The relationship in Germany is about as strong...

During the postwar period German states pursued policies to increase the share of young Germans obtaining a university entrance diploma (Abitur) by building more academic track schools, but the timing of educational expansion differed between states. This creates exogenous variation in the...

Previous research on the impact of unilateral divorce law (UDL) on the prevalence of divorce has provided mixed and little cumulative results. Studies based on cross‐sectional crosscountry survey data have been criticized for not being able to account for unobserved country heterogeneity,...

Previous research has shown adverse effects of growing up under unilateral divorce laws on long-term outcomes of children. It remains an open question of whether long-term effects of early childhood conditions arise because divorce laws raise the likelihood of parental marital disruption, or...

The paper studies the relevance of gender ideology for the geographic mobility of families using data from the German Socio-economic Panel. The analysis proceeds in two steps. First, it is shown single men and women – who are in some sense "unconstrained" optimizers – reveal...

Since 2003 German hospitals are reimbursed according to diagnosis related groups (DRGs). Patient classification in neonatology is based inter alia on birth weight, with substantial discontinuities in reimbursement at eight dierent thresholds. These discontinuities create strong incentives to...

In Deutschland ist soziale Ungleichheit in Gesundheit kaum in der öffentlichen Diskussion, obwohl auch hier besser gebildete, reichere, und in der beruflichen Hierarchie höher stehende Menschen zeitlebens gesünder sind und länger leben als andere. Soziale Ungleichheit wird dadurch entlang...

Using data from the Health Survey for England and the English Longitudinal Study on Ageing, we estimate the causal effect of schooling on health. Identification comes from two nation wide increases in British compulsory school leaving age in 1947 and 1973, respectively. Our study complements...