This study investigates the effects of maternal education on child's health and health behavior. We draw on a rich German panel data set containing information about three generations. This allows instrumenting maternal education by the number of her siblings while conditioning on grandparental...

The paper enriches a standard signaling model of education with issues of social distance defined over educational achievements. More specifically it considers the effects that the presence of conformist and status seeking individuals has on educational dynamics. Under very reasonable...

Despite numerous studies on skill development, we know little about the effects of extracurricular music activities on cognitive and non-cognitive skills. This study examines how music training during childhood and youth affects the development of cognitive skills, school grades, personality,...

An important education reform in Germany reduced the duration of university preparatory schooling from 13 to 12 years, but left the curriculum unchanged. In the state of Saxony-Anhalt the reform was completed in 2007 with a double cohort of graduates, providing a natural experiment. We use...

Student performance differs greatly across countries, but little is known about the role of teacher quality in explaining these differences. New international data from the PIAAC survey of adult skills allow for the first time to quantify teacher skills in numeracy and literacy, providing...

This article reconsiders the empirical evidence on regional human capital externalities using longitudal survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). It complements the empirical literature on the role of human capital for explaining regional wage differences. Based on the framework...

We present theory on international migration of dual-earner couples, and test it using Danish register data. Our model predicts that the probability that a couple emigrates is increasing in the earnings of the primary earner. The effect of the earnings of the secondary earner may go either way....

While there is a big literature on the benefits of pre-school education, only little is known why kindergarten attendance improves later-life outcomes. This is partly because most studies analyze the effect of complete 2 years pre-school programs. In order to shed light into the black box of...

This research challenges the stylized fact of a gender gap in financial literacy, i.e. the finding that women lag behind men in this respect. Our data which samples middle-class people from Bangkok does not show a gender gap, neither in regards to financial literacy nor regarding various kinds...