Anti-poverty policy in developing countries has focused mainly on the measurement and location of poverty and the targeting of policy towards those who are currently poor. Recently, the research effort has been extended to cover those judged to be not poor at present but vulnerable to poverty in...

The age at which children leave the parental home differs considerably across countries. In this paper we argue that lower job insecurity of parents and higher job insecurity of children delay emancipation. We provide aggregate evidence which supports this hypothesis for 12 European countries...

We show that in the US, the UK, Italy and Sweden women whose first child is a boy are less likely to work in a typical week and work fewer hours than women with first-born girls. The puzzle is why women in these countries react in this way to the sex of their first child, which is chosen...

We exploit rules of class formation to identify the causal effect of increasing the number of immigrants in a classroom on natives test scores, keeping class size constant (Pure Composition Effect). We explain why this is a relevant policy parameter although it has been neglected so far. We show...

Exploiting admission thresholds in a Regression Discontinuity Design, we study the causal effects of daycare at age 0-2 on cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes at age 8-14. One additional month in daycare reduces IQ by 0.5% (4.5% of a standard deviation). Effects for conscientiousness are small...