This paper presents evidence of substantial causal effects of parental education on children's health behaviours and long-term health. We study intergenerational effects of a compulsory schooling increase in Germany after World War II, which was implemented across federal states at different...

We exploit a large exogenous shock to study socioemotional development (SED) during adolescence and the consequences on relevant economic outcomes, focusing on gender differences. Using novel, longitudinal, microdata on cohorts of East German adolescents before and after a large macro shock (the...

In this paper, we use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to investigate the effect on cigarette consumption of macro-economic conditions in the form of regional unemployment rates. The results from our panel data models, several of which control for selection bias, indicate that the...

This paper studies the short-term impact of public smoking bans on hospitalizations in Germany. It exploits the staggered implementation of smoking bans over time and across the 16 federal states along with the universe of hospitalizations from 2000-2008 and daily county-level weather and...

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...

The identification of factors affecting birth weight is a key issue in human development due to its established associations with long-term health, educational and labour-market outcomes. This paper exploits intergenerational information on three generations (grandparents-parents-children) to...

In this paper we look at the relationship between health and income as mediated by "lifestyle" choices; that is, a set of behaviours which are thought to influence health and are generally considered to invoke a substantial degree of free choice. The main underlying assumption is that...

This paper is the first to provide evidence that cultural attitudes towards gender equality affect behaviors with potentially devastating health consequences, and that they do so differently for male and female teenagers. In particular, we show that descending from more gender-equal societies...

Previous researchers have argued that the social market for cigarettes insulates its participants from policies designed to curb youth smoking. Using state Youth Risk Behavior Survey data, we examine whether recent changes in state cigarette taxes affected how young smokers obtained their...