Health at birth is an important indicator of human capital development over the life course. This paper uses longitudinal data from the Young Lives survey and employs instrumental variable regression models to estimate the effect of birth weight on cognitive development during childhood in...

We estimate a system of three behavioral equations for Brazilian children and teenagers (school absenteeism, health status and child labor). We relieved the assumption of independence of the disturbance terms of each equation. Moreover, if causality mechanisms between these three components...

We use several datasets to study whether son preference prevails in the human capital investment among Chinese rural-urban migrant households. We find that son preference exists among the rural migrants’ households and that it caused lower probabilities relative to that of their boy...

Aiming to boost fertility rates, in 2007 the Spanish government implemented a universal €2500 baby bonus paid to mothers giving birth or adopting a child, leading to a short-lived increase in births. In this study, I measure the causal impact that the transfer had on the language and...

This study explores the allocation of time, particularly to sleep, among children and adolescents in response to daily solar cycles. Utilizing a dataset of over 50,000 time-use diaries from two Australian cohorts spanning 16 years and employing an individual fixed effects estimator, we uncover a...

This paper utilizes a Swedish alcohol policy experiment conducted in the late 1960s to identify the impact of prenatal alcohol exposure on educational attainments and labor market outcomes. The experiment started in November 1967 and was prematurely discontinued in July 1968 due to a sharp...

A longstanding question in the economics of the family is the relationship between sibship size and subsequent human capital formation and economic welfare. If there is a causal "quantity-quality tradeoff," then policies that discourage large families should lead to increased human capital,...

We study how the duration of paid parental leave affects the accumulation of cognitive skills among children. We use a reform which extended parental leave benefits from 12 to 15 months for Swedish children born after August 1988 to evaluate the effects of prolonged parental leave on...

This study examines the effects of parental labor market activities on children's education attainment. In contrast to the existing literature we consider parental experiences until the children graduate from school. In addition, the effects of the regional economic environment during teacher's...

During World War II, more than one-half million tons of bombs were dropped in aerial raids on German cities, destroying about one-third of the total housing stock nationwide. This paper provides causal evidence on long-term consequences of large-scale physical destruction on the educational...