The economic potential of ethnic and cultural diversity is often underestimated. This paper summarizes a number of recent studies which show that 'soft' factors such as attitudes, perceptions and identities - and in particular ethnic identities - significantly affect economic outcomes. More...

Religious beliefs and practices influence individual lives and societies in many ways. We study how religion affects self-assessed health, which in turn is important for both individual well-being and productivity. A religious background predicts worse health. As the previous literature has not...

In this paper, we study the evolution of cognitive and noncognitive skills gaps for children of immigrants between kindergarten and 5th grade. We find some evidence that children of immigrants begin school with lower math scores than children of natives, but this gap disappears in later...

Migration and stratification are increasingly intertwined. One day soon it will be impossible to understand one without the other. Both focus on life chances. Stratification is about differential life chances - who gets what and why - and migration is about improving life chances - getting more...

We document large differences in educational attainment, criminal sentences and use of psychotropic medication between the children of immigrants and natives living in Finland. Among the offspring of immigrants from the OECD countries and the former Soviet Union, the disadvantage in education...

Differences in the timing and pathway into family life provide insights into the social distance between majority and immigrant-background groups. Increasing similarity in these processes across immigrant generations may indicate blurring of group distinctions. We situate our study in Norway, a...

In this paper, I develop a measure of host country experience, which I call "relative time of arrival," to explore differences between first- and second-generation immigrants. This measure is finer than immigrant generation and expands on the widely used measures of years since migration and age...

This paper presents evidence that generalized trust promotes health. Children of immigrants in a broad set of European countries with ancestry from across the world are studied. Individuals are examined within country of residence using variation in trust across countries of ancestry. There is a...

Based on an innovative survey of seventh graders in German secondary schools, this paper analyzes students' feelings that they should be on a higher educational track, We show that ethnic minority students are not only more likely than majority students to be placed in the lowest track, but they...