This paper develops a model of skill formation that explains a variety of findings established in the child development and child intervention literatures. At its core is a technology that is stage-specific and that features self productivity, dynamic complementarity and skill multipliers....

This paper discusses (a) the role of cognitive and noncognitive ability in shaping adult outcomes, (b) the early emergence of differentials in abilities between children of advantaged families and children of disadvantaged families, (c) the role of families in creating these abilities, (d)...

Microinsurance is an emerging concept protecting households from the potentially catastrophic expenditures associated with family related shocks. Therefore, this paper presents evidence on the determinants of insurance participation using probit models on household survey data from Sri Lanka,...

We hypothesize that individuals with a larger social-family network are more likely to choose self-employment. We test this hypothesis using data on temporary rural-urban migrants in China. The size of a migrant's social-family network is measured by the number of relatives and friends this...

We use a large, rich Canadian micro-level dataset to examine the channels through which family socio-economic status and unobservable characteristics aff ect children's decisions to drop out of high school. First, we document the strength of observable socio-economic factors: our data suggest...

This paper investigates how the permanent departure of the head from the household, mainly due to death or divorce, affects children's school enrolment and work participation in rural Colombia. In our empirical specification we use household-level fixed effects to deal with the fact that...

This paper tests whether family size has a causal effect on girls' education in Mexico. It exploits son preference as the main source of random variation in the propensity to have more children, and estimates causal effects using instrumental variables. Overall, it finds no evidence of family...

It is well known that children growing up in poor families leave school with considerably lower qualifications than children from better off backgrounds. Using a simple decomposition analysis, we show that around two thirds of the socio-economic gap in attainment at age 16 can be accounted for...

This paper focuses on the relationship between wages and supply of informal care to elderly parents. Unlike most of the previous research estimating wage elasticities of informal care supply, this study employs instrumental variable technique to account for the fact that the wage rate is likely...

Using fixed effects ordered logit estimation, we investigate the relationship between part-time work and working hours satisfaction; job satisfaction; and life satisfaction. We account for interdependence within the family using data on partnered men and women from the British Household Panel...