This study tests an intervention that introduces a structured curriculum for five-year olds into the universal preschool context of Norway. We conduct a field experiment with 691 five-year-olds in 71 preschools and measure treatment impacts on children's development in mathematics, language and...

This article investigates the effects of an increase in paid parental leave - twelve months instead of six months - on children's long-term life satisfaction. The historical setting under study, namely the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), allows us to circumvent problems of selection of...

A currently high-ranking question on the political agenda of many developed countries relates to the intensive margin of child care and thus to the effects of prolonging the opening hours of child care institutions. This study adds to the scarce literature on this question and investigates the...

We provide a novel interpretation of the estimated treatment effects from evaluations of parental leave reforms. Accounting for the counterfactual mode of care is crucial in the analysis of child outcomes and potential mediators. We evaluate a large and generous parental leave extension in...

Noise pollution is detrimental to health and to cognitive development of children. This is not only true for extreme levels of noise in the neighborhood of an airport but also to traffic noise in urban areas. Using a census of preschool children, we show that children who are exposed to...

Children are increasingly recognized as secondary victims of intimate partner violence. This paper uses a unique UK longitudinal child development survey to study the relationship between verbal and physical abuse experienced by mothers and children's development up to the age of seven....

Children starting school at older ages consistently exhibit better educational outcomes. In this paper, we underscore child development as a mechanism driving this effect. We study the causal effect of school starting age on a child's probability of developing special educational needs in early...

In this paper, we examine the heterogeneous treatment effects of a universal child care (preschool) program in Germany by exploiting the exogenous variation in attendance caused by a reform that led to a large staggered expansion across municipalities. Drawing on novel administrative data from...

In 1998 the Norwegian government introduced a program that increased parents' incentives to stay home with children under the age of three. Many eligible children had older siblings, and we investigate how this program affected long-run educational outcomes of the older siblings. Using...

This paper investigates the question whether long-term human capital outcomes are affected by the duration of maternity leave, i.e. by the time mothers spend at home with their newborn before returning to work. Employing RD and difference-in-difference approaches, this paper exploits an...