From 1995 to 2015, the aggregate college completion rate in the US increased from 22.9% to 33.5%. Yet, completion trends differed markedly for individuals from different family backgrounds. This paper considers the extent to which trends in college preparedness contributed to the growth in...

Individuals typically traverse several life phases before forming a family. We analyse whether changing the duration of one of these phases, the education phase, affects the timing of marriage and childbearing. For this purpose, we exploit the introduction of short school years in Germany in...

How do institutions and peer groups shape skills? We exploit a universal free-choice reform signaling less importance of advanced math-science in high school. We show how it amplified the fall in math-science skills and triggered gender convergence as boys crowded-in the free-choice reform. We...

This study investigates the causal effect of older siblings’ schooling on their younger siblings’ schooling and labor market outcomes by exploiting the temporal and geographical variations in the implementation of compulsory schooling laws in China. Reform exposure is quantified as the...

When judged either by educational attainment of adult population or by secondary and tertiary enrollment rates, Albania by 2002 compared very unfavorably to most European countries, including its neighbors. This study examines the determinants of secondary enrollment applying unobserved family...

This paper investigates the relationship between kindergarten attendance and secondary school track choice in West-Germany. Our analysis is based on a panel of 12 to 14-year olds with information from age two on, drawn from the German SocioEconomic Panel (GSOEP) 1984?2005. We estimate binary...

This paper investigates how the permanent departure of the father from the household affects children's school enrolment and work participation in rural Colombia. Our results show that departure of the father decreases children's school enrolment by around 4 percentage points, and increases...

Researchers claim that children growing up away from their biological parents may be at a disadvantage and have lower human capital investment. This paper measures the impact of child fostering on school enrollment and uses household and child fixed effects regressions to address the endogeneity...

We analyze the impact on schooling outcomes of growing up in a family headed by a single mother. Growing up in a non-intact family in Germany is associated with worse outcomes in models that do not control for possible correlations between common unobserved determinants of family structure and...

We present evidence on whether and how a household's behavior is influenced by the presence and characteristics of its extended family. Using data from the PROGRESA program in Mexico, we exploit information on the paternal and maternal surnames of heads and spouses in conjunction with the...