Health at birth is an important indicator of human capital development over the life course. This paper uses longitudinal data from the Young Lives survey and employs instrumental variable regression models to estimate the effect of birth weight on cognitive development during childhood in...

This paper investigates the impact of attending early childcare on second generation immigrant children's cognitive outcomes. Our analysis draws on administrative data on the entire population of students in fifth grade collected by the Italian Institute for the Evaluation of the Educational...

We exploit the exogenous variations of arsenic contamination across regions in Cambodia and apply two-period difference-in-differences (DID) to examine the impact of arsenic-contaminated groundwater on school participation among children aged 5-17. We find that conditional on the DID assumption,...

Using over 50 thousand time-use diaries from two cohorts of children, we document significant gender differences in time allocation in the first 16 years in life. Relative to males, females spend more time on personal care, chores and educational activities and less time on physical and media...

This paper examines the effects of an increase in the compulsory school leaving age on the teenage fertility of Roma women, a disadvantaged ethnic minority in Hungary. We use a regression discontinuity design identification strategy and show that the reform decreased the probability of teenage...

During the Great Recession, the increase in Greece's unemployment rate was the highest in the European Union. However, there exists no multivariate study which has assessed the association between parental unemployment and adolescents' grades. The study utilised panel data from the same upper...

We evaluate the impact of introducing a pre-primary schooling program in government schools in the Indian state of West Bengal in 2013 on children’s early enrollment in schools and subsequent test scores. Using double difference, triple difference, and synthetic control methodologies, we find...

Providing income support to unemployed education-leavers reduces the returns to investments in education because it makes the consequences of unemployment less severe. We evaluate a two-part policy reform in Belgium to study whether conditioning the prospective entitlement to unemployment...

A double disadvantage occurs when the interaction of two disadvantages generates an additional disadvantage. We show that second-generation immigrant children in the Italian primary school experience a double disadvantage that, relative to the average native, reduces scores in Italian by 17% and...

This study examines the impacts of caregiving by grandparents on children's academic performance in China, using data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS 2010 and 2014). Applying pooled OLS, instrumental variables and fixed-effects models with panel data estimation techniques, we find...