The paper demonstrates how Sen's (1985) alternative approach to welfare economics can be used to shed light on the wellbeing of very young children. More specifically, we estimate versions of the three key relations from his framework using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP)...

This paper models child employment and parental pocket money decisions as a non-cooperative game. Assuming that the child human capital is a household public good and that the relationship between child human capital and employment is concave, we compare the welfare obtained under different...

Female secondary school attendance has recently increased in Sub-Saharan Africa and so has the risk of becoming pregnant while attending school. Using panel data in Madagascar, we analyze the impact of teenage pregnancy on young women's human capital. We instrument early pregnancy with the young...

Early motherhood remains a widespread phenomenon in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). While the consequences of early motherhood for the mother have been extensively investigated, the impact on their children is severely understudied, especially in LMICs, which host 95% of teen births...

We identify the causal effect of mothers' mental health during early - and soon after pregnancy on a range of child psychological, socio-emotional and cognitive outcomes measured between ages 4-16. Results suggest a negative effect on children's psychological and socio-emotional skills in early...

We use data from the 11 waves of the U.S. Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development 1991-2005, following children from ages 6 months through 15 years. Observers rated videos of them, obtaining measures of looks at each age. Given their family income, parents' education, race/ethnicity and...

Sweden was early to legalize same-sex partnership (1995), to allow same-sex couples to adopt children (2003), and to offer same-sex couples fertility treatment through the national health system (2005). Using population data, we identify children of lesbian parents as those whose biological...

Despite increasing attention being paid to the temporal dynamics of childhood disadvantage, children's neighborhood characteristics are often measured at a single point in time. Whether such cross-sectional measures serve as reliable proxies for children's long-run neighborhood conditions...

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, this paper analyses the effects of spending part of adolescents' leisure time on playing music or doing sports, or both. We find that while playing music fosters educational outcomes compared to doing sports, particularly so for girls and children...

BACKGROUND: Internal migration, mostly composed of young adults and the poor, constitutes the largest flow of people in developing countries. Few studies document the patterns and determinants of internal youth migration in sub-Saharan Africa. OBJECTIVES: This paper analyzes the socioeconomic...