This paper examines pathways through which parental characteristics might affect children’s cognitive and behavioural outcomes. Using the 2004 LSAC, I show that more educated and mentally healthier parents are likely to have children with better outcomes. While educated parents are more...

Under Indonesia's anti-poverty program, IDT, the government provided selected poor villages with grants of the same value, regardless of population size. Exploiting the variation in per household grant value that is caused by this program design, I estimate the returns to public grants, which...

In this paper we develop a small open economy, overlapping generations (OLG) model that incorporates non-stationary demographic transition paths to study the dynamic fiscal effects of demographic shift in Australia. Our main results are summarised as follows. First, the demographic shifts...

This paper documents a stylized fact: the Third World has been undergoing an emigration life cycle since the 1960s, and, except for Africa, emigration rates have been level or even declining since a peak in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The current economic crisis will serve only to...

Using the first two waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, this paper explores the relationship between educational attainment and age at first marriage. Theory suggests that there are two effects driving the relationship, namely the Enrolment effect and...

We use unique retrospective family background data from the 2003 wave of the British Household Panel Survey to explore the degree to which family size and birth order affect a child’s subsequent educational attainment. Theory suggests a trade off between child quantity and ‘quality’....

This paper analyses the net worth and asset portfolios of native- and foreign-born Australian families using HILDA (wave 2) data. Specifically, we estimate a system of asset equations with an adding-up constraint imposed to control for variation in households’ total net worth. Our results...

According to the 1911 Census, the proportion female of those receiving university education was around 22%, growing to 29% in 1921. By 1952 it had dropped to under 20%, due to easy access into universities for returning war-veterans. From the early 1950s, the university-educated gender gap began...

Between 1958 and 1961, China experienced one of the worse famines in her history. Birth rates fell during these years and recovered immediately afterwards. The famine also adversely affected the health of these cohorts. This paper provides nonparametric estimates of the total effects of the...

Governments in the OECD note rising immigration with alarm and grapple with policies aimed at selecting certain migrants and keeping out others. Economists appear to be well armed to advise governments since they are responsible for an impressive literature that examines the characteristics of...