We study the development of teenage fertility in East and West Germany using data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP) and from the German Mikrozensus. Following the international literature we derive hypotheses on the patterns of teenage fertility and test whether they are relevant in the...

What are the effects of school and daycare facility closures during the COVID-19 pandemic on parental well-being and parenting behavior? Can emergency childcare policies during a pandemic mitigate increases in parental stress and negative parenting behavior? To answer these questions, this study...

This paper studies the optimal design of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) policies in an economy where individuals differ in their reproductive capacity (or fecundity) and in their wage. We find that the optimal ART policy varies with the postulated social welfare criterion....

Low minimum legal drinking ages (MLDAs), as prevalent in many European countries, are severely understudied. We use rich survey and administrative data to estimate the impact of the Austrian MLDA of 16 on teenage drinking behavior and morbidity. Regression discontinuity estimates show that legal...

Oil spills can lead to irreversible environmental degradation and pose hazards to human health. We are the first to study the causal effects of onshore oil spills on neonatal and infant mortality rates. We use spatial data from the Nigerian Oil Spill Monitor and the Demographic and Health...

The proportion of people sleeping less than the daily-recommended hours has increased. Yet, we know little about the labour market returns to sleep. We use longitudinal data from Germany and exploit exogenous variation in sleep duration induced by time and local variations in sunset time. We...

This chapter reviews the literature on the causal effects of policies on fertility. It focuses on evidence from experiments and quasi-experiments in low fertility contexts, including studies from Europe, Northern America, Oceania and Asia. Making no a priori restrictions on policy type, the...

Although a significant number of middle and low-income countries have expanded access to subsidized health insurance, it still is unclear whether these insurance expansions improve children's health, This paper exploits quasi-random variation from an insurance expansion targeted at poor...

This paper analyzes historical census data from the final Soviet census in 1989. We find that, even in the absence of sex-selective abortions, the fertility decisions of Armenian, Georgian, and Azeri parents living in Russia in the late 1970s and the 1980s were significantly more son-biased than...