Child care and education are important inputs in the human capital production function. The research of Nobel prize winner James Heckman shows that skills are built from the early childhood on and increase the returns of later educational inputs, in short: skill begets skill. Therefore, it is...

Using over 50 thousand time-use diaries from two cohorts of children, we document significant gender differences in time allocation in the first 16 years in life. Relative to males, females spend more time on personal care, chores and educational activities and less time on physical and media...

The impact of children's early development status on parental labor market outcomes is not well established in the empirical literature. We combine an instrumental variable approach to account for the endogeneity of the development status with a model of non- random labor force participation to...

A large share of young mothers return to work before their child turns one year. Exploiting exogenous variation in daycare vacancy rates, we estimate the causal effects of enrollment age in universal daycare on child development for children younger than two years. We find modest effects of...

Many parents return to work, placing their child in nonparental care before the age of one. Using variations in daycare vacancy rates, we estimate the causal effects of enrollment age in universal daycare on child development. In general, we find no evidence that earlier enrollment harms early...

This paper presents results from a randomized evaluation of a home visiting program for disadvantaged first time mothers and their families implemented in three German federal states. At the end of the first year of the program, children in home visited families perform significantly better than...

With the goal to shed more light on the effectiveness of parental time spent with their children, I estimate the causal relationship between parental involvement and education outcomes of children. My research is the first which examines the effect of parental time in terms of the engagement in...

Nirgends sonst im ökonomischen Handeln fallen Kosten und Nutzen im Zeitablauf und aufgeteilt nach Investoren und Nutznießern so eklatant auseinander wie bei Bildungsinvestitionen. In dem vorliegenden Beitrag wird argumentiert, dass in der sozialen Realität die Bildungsungleichheit im...

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...