Manifold childhood impressions result from the interactions with adult caregivers and the environment. These impressions, be they beneficial or detrimental, shape individual skill formation and achievement over the life cycle. The novelty of the paper is that it bonds two different, hitherto...

This paper investigates the role of early life adversity and home resources in terms of competence formation and school achievement based on data from an epidemiological cohort study following 364 children from birth to adolescence. Results indicate that organic and psychosocial risks present in...

We identify the ages that constitute critical periods in children's development towards their adult health status. For this we use data on families migrating into Sweden from countries that are mostly poorer, with less healthy conditions. Long-run health is proxied by adult height. The relation...

We test whether adverse childhood experiences - exposure to parental maltreatment and its indirect effect on health - are associated with age 30 personality traits. We use rich longitudinal data from a large, representative cohort of young US Americans and exploit differences across siblings to...

We describe gender and socioeconomic inequalities in the Big Five personality traits over the life cycle, using a facet-level inventory linked to administrative data. We estimate life-cycle profiles non-parametrically and test for cohort and sample-selection effects. We discuss the economic...

Understanding who in the population is psychologically resilient in the face of major life events, and who is not, is important for policies that target reductions in disadvantage. In this paper we construct a measure of adult resilience, document its distribution, and test its predictability by...

This paper examines the effectiveness of leaders in addressing coordination failure in societies with ethnic or religious diversity. We experimentally vary leader identity in a coordination game and implement it in the field across 44 towns in India. We find that religious minority leaders...

While researchers are increasingly reconceptualising international migration, less interest is being shown in rethinking the geographies of short-distance residential mobility and immobility. Short-distance moves are crucial for the structuration of everyday life, the operation of housing and...

We investigate how worries in Germany change across time and age, drawing on both closed-ended questions (which typically list a number of worry items) and open-ended questions answered in text format. We find that relevant world events influence worries. For example, worries about peace peaked...

This paper examines ethnic differences in childhood neighborhood disadvantage among children living in the Netherlands. In contrast to more conventional approaches for assessing children's exposure to neighborhood poverty and affluence (e.g., point-in-time and cumulative measures of exposure),...