The COVID-19 pandemic caused widespread disruptions to education, with school closures affecting over one billion children. These closures, aimed at reducing virus transmission, resulted in significant learning losses, particularly in mathematics and science. Using data from TIMSS 2023, which...

The first pandemic of the 21st century has brought Pyrrhic attention to one of the era's greatest megatrends - population ageing. Today rich countries are disproportionately affected but increasingly the world's elderly are residents of developing countries. In rich and poor countries alike, a...

This paper studies the effects of import competition from China and Eastern Europe (EE) on the fertility decisions of individuals in German manufacturing. Through the lens of gender, the paper uniquely contributes to the literature by linking import competition to longitudinal individual data to...

The Healthy Immigrant Paradox found in the literature by comparing the health of immigrants to that of natives in the host country, may suffer from serious cultural biases. Our study evades such biases by utilizing a destination-origin framework, in which we compare the health of emigrants to...

The ‘mobility transition’ hypothesis - with emigration first increasing and then decreasing as a country develops - (Zelinsky, 1971) is often interpreted as a stylised fact, which bears the implication that immigration into rich countries will grow as low-income countries develop. This paper...

This study explores the effects of imbalances in the sex ratio, and their impact on intra-household bargaining, on both the quantity and the quality of children. We first present the theoretical model of intra-household bargaining in the presence of conflicting family goals within a couple, and...

Despite significant headwinds from population aging in most advanced economies (AEs), labor force participation rates show remarkably divergent trajectories both across countries and across different groups of workers. Participation increased sharply among prime-age women and, more recently,...

There have been significant changes in both the fertility rates and fertility perception since 1970s. In this paper, we examine the relationship between government policies towards fertility and the fertility trends. Total fertility rate, defined as the number of children per woman, is used as...

This paper studies the dynamics of fertility in 180 countries in the period 1950ñ 2015 and investigates the determinants of the onset of fertility transitions. The application of Phillips and Sulís (2007) test to fertility rates provides evidence of convergence in three groups of countries....

China still lags behind Europe along the path of the demographic transition and therefore is still much younger. However, due to the speed with which the fertility rate dropped and life expectancy increased, China ageing process will proceed at a very fast space and around the middle of the...