This paper uses data from the BRFSS over the period 2014-2019 to analyse the impact of removing surgical requirements to change legal gender. In many states transgender people are forced to undergo surgical procedures if they wish to change their gender on ID documents, which can be invasive,...

We develop a model which shows that wages, prices and real income should grow faster in countries with low increase in their labour force. If not, other countries experience growing unemployment and/or trade deficit. This result is applied to the case of Germany, which has displayed a...

While female labor force participation (LFP) in Iran is among the lowest in the world, there is hardly any study on the COVID-19 pandemic effects on the country's female LFP. We find that female LFP decreased during the pandemic years by around 1 percentage point in 2021 and 2022. When...

We use administrative panel data on about a quarter of a million students in the German state of Hesse to estimate the causal effect of class size on school tracking outcomes after elementary school. Our identification strategy relies on the quasi-random assignment of students to different class...

We examine the role of teachers and students in the formation of grade 12 test scores in public schools in Delhi. There is substantial variation in teacher and student quality within schools. Over the period spanning grades 11 and 12, being taught by a standard deviation better than average...

Very few studies currently exist on the long-term impacts of schooling policies in developing countries. We examine the impacts-half a century later-of a mass education program conducted by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the occupied areas during the First Indochina War....

The paper investigates whether self-employment represents a way to reduce overeducation and improve labour market matching, in a comparative analysis between immigrants and natives. Using the EU Labour Force Survey for the year 2012, and controlling for a list of demographic characteristics and...

To study the causal impact of smartphone use on academic performance, we collected - for the first time worldwide - longitudinal data on students' smartphone use and educational performance. For three consecutive years we surveyed all students attending classes in eleven different study...

Do investments in soft skills pay off in terms of student achievement? This paper evaluates a large private-sector program in this area, EPIS, based on individual and small-group sessions of mediators that seek to improve the non-cognitive skills (e.g. motivation, self-esteem, conscientiousness)...

We study the causal effect of maternal education on childhood immunization rates. We use the Compulsory Education Law (CEL) of 1997, and the differentiation in its implementation across regions, as instruments for schooling of young mothers in Turkey. The CEL increased the compulsory years of...