We use unique administrative German data to examine the role of childhood health for the intergenerational transmission of human capital. Specifically, we examine the extent to which a comprehensive list of health conditions - diagnosed by government physicians - can account for developmental...

This paper uses the 1918 influenza pandemic in Taiwan as a natural experiment to test whether in utero conditions affect long-run developmental outcomes. Combining several historical and current datasets, we find that cohorts in utero during the pandemic are shorter as child/teenagers, less...

In this paper, we focus on the impact of early grandparents' care on child cognitive outcomes, in the short and medium term, using data from the Millennium Cohort Study (UK). Compared with children looked after in a formal care centre, children cared by grandparents (as well as parents) are...

Is maternal employment beneficial or harmful for child development? Maternal employment generates income, which is needed to provide core inputs for children's health and education. However, maternal employment comes at the cost of time spent with children, which is also a critical input into...

This paper investigates the impact of parenting courses on families' time use with their children in urban areas in Italy. Courses aimed at raising parental awareness of the importance of educational activities were offered in four cities (Naples, Reggio Emilia, Teramo and Palermo) within the...

This paper investigates the effects of public childcare availability in Italy on mothers' working status and children's scholastic achievements. We use a newly available dataset containing individual standardized test scores of pupils attending second grade of primary school in 2008-09 in...

Many social scientists hypothesize that the time mothers spend with their children is crucial for children's cognitive development. Unlike most studies that focus on maternal employment effects on children, we estimate direct causal effects of time-diary measured maternal time using the Child...

This paper investigates the role of self-productivity and home resources in capability formation from infancy to adolescence. In addition, we study the complementarities between basic cognitive, motor and noncognitive abilities and social as well as academic achievement. Our data are taken from...