This paper explores the power of personality traits both as predictors and as causes of academic and economic success, health, and criminal activity. Measured personality is interpreted as a construct derived from an economic model of preferences, constraints, and information. Evidence is...

We construct a new, direct measure of female autonomy in household decision-making by creating an index from the principal components of a variety of household variables on which mother of a child takes decision. We then examine its impacts on her child's secondary education in Mexico and find...

This paper provides evidence on how adverse health conditions affect the transfer of human capital from one generation to the next. We explore the differential exposure to HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa as a substantial health shock to both household and community environment. We...

In recent years, child care subsidies have become an integral part of federal and state efforts to move economically disadvantaged parents from welfare to work. Although previous empirical studies consistently show that these employment-related subsidies raise work levels among this group,...

The need for education to help every child rather than focus on average attainment has become a more central part of the policy agenda in the US and the UK. Remedial programmes are often difficult to evaluate because participation is usually based on pupil characteristics that are largely...

This paper makes a significant contribution on both conceptual and methodological fronts, in the analysis of the effect of maternal autonomy on school enrolment age of children in India. The school entry age is modelled using a discrete time duration model where maternal autonomy is entered as a...

A large number of studies in labor economics estimate the returns to schooling using data on monozygotic twins, under the assumption that educational attainment is random within twin pairs. This exogeneity assumption has been commonly questioned, however, but there is to date little evidence on...

A number of studies have shown that childhood speech impairments such as stuttering are associated with lower test scores and educational attainment. However, it is unclear whether this result is causal in nature or whether it can be explained by difficult-to-measure heterogeneity at the...

This paper estimates the causal effect of being born to a teenage mother on children's outcomes, exploiting compulsory schooling changes as the source of exogenous variation. We impose external estimates of the direct effect of maternal education on child outcomes within a plausible exogeneity...

In this paper we examine the effect of birth order on human capital development in Ecuador using a large national database together with self-collected survey data. Using family fixed effects models we find significant positive birth order effects; earlier born children stay behind in their...