We study OECD countries that differ in immigration policies but share a high level of human capital. We find significant negative statistical relationship between 16 years lagged fertility and the rate of immigration in a panel of 23 countries, which indicates that immigration compensates for...

We find that segments of society who have shorter life expectancy can expect a lower retirement income and lifetime utility due to the longevity of other groups participating in the same pension scheme. Linking retirement age to average life expectancy magnifies the negative effect on the...

This paper uses data taken from the tax returns of all Icelandic taxpayers in 2005-2019, a period that saw large changes in disposable income around the country’s financial crisis in 2008, to plot the life-cycle path of consumption and income for different education groups and to estimate the...

Recently, mandatory pension contributions in the private sector in Iceland were increased substantially while remaining unchanged in the public sector. This constituted a large natural experiment. We study the effects of this experiment on households’ voluntary saving using administrative...

Rising inequality in the United States has raised concerns about potentially widening gaps in educational achievement by socio-economic status (SES). Using assessments from LTT-NAEP, Main-NAEP, TIMSS, and PISA that are psychometrically linked over time, we trace trends in achievement for U.S....

Patience and risk-taking – two cultural traits that steer intertemporal decision-making – are fundamental to human capital investment decisions. To understand how they contribute to international differences in student achievement, we combine PISA tests with the Global Preference Survey. We...

German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly...

We study whether compulsory religious education in schools affects students’ religiosity as adults. We exploit the staggered termination of compulsory religious education across German states in models with state and cohort fixed effects. Using three different datasets, we find that abolishing...