We study the intergenerational transmission of welfare benefit receipt in Germany. We first describe the correlation between welfare receipt experienced in the parental household and subsequent own welfare receipt of young adults. In a second step, we investigate whether the observed...

Strong intergenerational associations in wealth have fueled a longstanding debate over why children of wealthy parents tend to be well off themselves. We investigate the role of family background in determining children's wealth accumulation and investor behavior as adults. The analysis is made...

Using discontinuities within the Swedish SAT system, we show that additional admission opportunities causally affect college choices. Students with high-educated parents change timing, colleges, and fields in ways that appear consistent with basic economic theory. In contrast, very talented...

Correlations between parent and child earnings reflect intergenerational mobility and, more broadly, correlations between siblings' earnings reflect shared community and family background. These earnings relationships capture important aspects of relations in socio-economic status more...

This study argues that parents have a desire for dividing equally between their children, and that this motive applies to transfers of gifts inter vivos. We suggest that the equal division motive competes with traditional altruism: support to the child or the children with greatest needs. When...

In this paper we treat an individual's health as a continuous variable, in contrast to the traditional literature on income insurance, where it is regularly treated as a binary variable. This is not a minor technical matter; in fact, a continuous treatment of an individual's health sheds new...