This paper uses administrative longitudinal micro data on the universe of Junior High school students in Uruguay to measure the effect of grade failure on students' subsequent school outcomes. Exploiting the discontinuity induced by a rule establishing automatic grade failure for pupils missing...

There is theoretical evidence that economic and family policies have an important impact on mother''s employment. The aim of this article is to study empirically the women''s transitions from employment to non-employment after they have their first birth in Belgium, West-Germany, Italy, Spain...

This paper investigates whether there exists an employment penalty from motherhood in Spain. In particular, we are interested in transitions from employment to non-employment and downward occupational mobility. Results show that Spanish women experience significant transitions from employment to...

The main purpose of this paper is to show how the labour market affects Spanish individual fertility decisions. Spain is an interesting case due to its huge fertility decline. Our hypothesis is that precarious Spanish labour markets (i.e. high unemployment rates and fixedterm contracts) postpone...

In the past few years the informal sector in countries in transition has increasingly become the focus of research, public policy and the media. The term ¿informal sector¿ has been used to describe an extremely wide spectrum of activities, which do not necessarily have much in common, such as...

We identify the impact of local firm concentration on incumbent performance with a quasi natural experiment. When Germany was divided after World War II, many firms in the machine tool industry fled the Soviet occupied zone to prevent expropriation. We show that the regional location decisions...

Empirical papers studying the effects of neighbourhood characteristics on socio-economic variables have predominantly used US data. We argue that the local nature of the US schooling system means that neighbourhood effects on education decisions may act through fiscal or social channels. We use...

The high school exit exam (HSEE) is rapidly becoming a standardized assessment procedure for educational accountability in the United States. I use a unique state-specific dataset to identify the effect of failing the HSEE on the likelihood that a student drops out early based on a Regression...

Individuals and business owners engage in an increasingly complex array of financial decisions that are critical for their success and well-being. Yet a growing literature documents that in both developed and developing countries, a large fraction of the population is unprepared to make these...

Labor market institutions, via their effect on the wage structure, affect the investment decisions of firms in labor markets with frictions. This observation helps explain rising wage inequality in the US, but a relatively stable wage structure in Europe in the 1980s. These different trends are...