Child skills are shaped by parental investments. Health shocks to parents can affect these investments and their children's skills. This paper estimates causal effects of severe parental health shocks on child socio-emotional skills. Drawing on a large-scale survey linked to hospital records, we...

Grade retention offers students a chance to catch up with unmastered material but also leads to less labor-market experience by delaying graduation and labor-market entry. This is the first paper to quantify this trade-off, using an exit exam cutoff of Dutch academic secondary schools, where...

This paper studies whether specialized academic fields of study in secondary school, which are common in many countries, affect earnings as an adult. Identification is challenging, because it requires not just quasi-random variation into fields of study, but also an accounting of individuals’...

In this study, we examine the influence of competitiveness on the stability of labour relations using the example of premature employment and training contract termination in the apprenticeship education sector. The paper extends the small but growing evidence on the external relevance of...

We investigate the effects of a large-scale Norwegian reform that provided extra teachers to 166 lower secondary schools with relatively high student-teacher ratios and low average grades. We exploit these two margins using a regression discontinuity setup and find that the reform reduced the...

A nascent but burgeoning literature examines the importance of non-cognitive skills in determining success across many facets of life. The majority of these papers treat these skills as fixed traits for adults. We estimate the impact of a number of life events on the Big Five personality traits...

Recent evidence suggests that self-regulation plays an important role for labor market success. We conducted a randomized natural field experiment embedded in an existing labor market reactivation program to examine the effect of a self-regulation training on long-term unemployed individuals....

Based on a sample of elderly individuals from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe, we investigate the relationship between job and marital stability over the life cycle. We argue that an unobserved, time-varying social skill affects stability in both markets. Using a grouped...

We use Swiss data to test whether intergenerational educational mobility is affected by the age at which children first enter (primary) school. Early age at school entry significantly affects mobility and reduces the relative advantage of children of better educated parents. -- Age at entry ;...

This paper argues that the consumption value of education is an important motivation for the educational choice. While controlling for ability, we document that individuals are willing to forego substantial future wage returns in order to acquire a particular type of higher education. We...