The birth order literature emphasizes the role of parental investments in explaining why firstborns have higher human capital outcomes than their laterborn siblings. We use birth order as a proxy for investments and interact it with genetic endowments. Exploiting only within-family variation in...

We combine data from the Amsterdam secondary-school match with register data and survey data to estimate the effects of not being assigned to one's first-ranked school on academic outcomes and on a wide range of other outcomes. For identification we use that secondaryschool assignment in...

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....

We use admission lotteries for higher education studies in the Netherlands to investigate whether someone's field of study influences the study choices of their younger peers. We find that younger siblings and cousins are strongly affected. Also younger neighbors are affected but to a smaller...

This paper studies the effect of multigrading-mixing children of different ages in the same classroom-on students' short- versus long-term academic achievement in Italy. We cope with the endogeneity of multigrading (and class size) through an instrumental variable identification strategy based...

We analyse the evolving impact of family background on educational attainment using administrative data on 2,417,460 individuals from 1,341,403 families born in the Netherlands between 1966 and 1995. Comparisons between parents and their children reveal intergenerational elasticities between...

This paper formulates a simple skill and education model to explain how better access to higher education leads to stronger assortative mating on skills of parents and more polarized skill and earnings distributions of children. Swedish data show that in the second half of the 20th century more...

This paper examines the effect of differences in ability on the timing and number ofchildren. Higher skilled women have less disutility of labor and have relatively lessutility of raising children. Motherhood has a negative effect on the accumulation ofhuman capital by learning-by-doing and...

A large literature establishes that cognitive and non-cognitive skills are strongly correlated with educational attainment and professional achievement. Isolating the causal effects of these traits on career outcomes is complicated by reverse causality and selection issues. We suggest a new...