In this paper we investigate the causal effect of years of schooling on health and health-related behavior in West Germany. We apply an instrumental variables approach using as natural experiments several changes in compulsory schooling laws between 1949 and 1969. These law changes generate...

We use newly available data from Germany to study the relationship between parental income and child health. We find a strong gradient between parental income and subjective child health as has been documented earlier in the US, Canada and the UK. The relationship in Germany is about as strong...

Using German census data we estimate the causal effect of education on smoking and overweight/obesity using the abolition of secondary school fees as instrumental variable. The West German federal states enacted this reform at different dates after World War II generating exogenous variation in...

Using data from the Health Survey for England and the English Longitudinal Study on Ageing, we estimate the causal effect of schooling on health. Identification comes from two nation wide increases in British compulsory school leaving age in 1947 and 1973, respectively. Our study complements...

Previous research has shown adverse effects of growing up under unilateral divorce laws on long-term outcomes of children. It remains an open question of whether long-term effects of early childhood conditions arise because divorce laws raise the likelihood of parental marital disruption, or...

During the postwar period German states pursued policies to increase the share of young Germans obtaining a university entrance diploma (Abitur) by building more academic track schools, but the timing of educational expansion differed between states. This creates exogenous variation in the...

It has been found that premarital cohabitation is positively correlated with the likelihood of marital dissolution in the U.S. To reassess this link, I estimate proportional hazard models of marital dissolution for first marriages using pooled data from three surveys of the NSFG 1988, 1995, and...

This paper explores the extent to which temporary Mexican migrants upgrade their skills while working in the United States. The vast majority of the migration that we observe is undertaken without documents. In contrast to Lacuesta (2006), we find that labor market performance in Mexico is...

Self-rated health (SRH) is a common health measurement in international research. Yet different versions of this item are often applied. This study compares the US (United States) version (from excellent to poor) and the EU (European) version (from very good to very bad) of SRH, and examines...

We use data from the West German 1970 census to explore the link between being born during or shortly after World War II and educational and labor market outcomes 25 years later. We document, for the first time, that men and women born in the relatively short period between November 1945 and May...