This paper discusses some recent advances in the area of culture and economics and examines the effect of culture on a key economic outcome: female labour supply. To separate the effect of market variables and institutions from culture, I use an epidemiological approach, studying...

Using individual-level panel data from European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (2007-2010) we explore to what extend wage differentials across European countries are explained by differences in education, actual experience and health. The human capital literature suggests an...

The empirical evidence on the inter-generational effects of maternal health interventions is inconclusive, particularly the impact on cognitive ability of children. In this paper, we study one such popular policy from India, viz, the Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) which is a agship health and safe...

In this paper, we study how parents react to a widely-used school policy that puts some children at a learning disadvantage. Specifically, we first document that, in line with findings in other countries, younger children in Spain perform significantly worse at school than their older peers and...

We find an inverted relation between a player's birthday and the likelihood of receiving the Ballon d'Or (awarded to the best football player in the world). We develop a multi-period skill formation model with selection into elite education. We show that those born late (underdogs) need to work...

In this paper we examine whether – conditional on other family inputs – bilingual children achieve different outcomes in language and emotional development. Our data come from the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) which allows us to analyze children's language and emotional development in...

Researchers claim that children growing up away from their biological parents may be at a disadvantage and have lower human capital investment. This paper measures the impact of child fostering on school enrollment and uses household and child fixed effects regressions to address the endogeneity...

In the present paper the effects of different pay-as-you-go pension systems on fertility decisions of a representative household are examined. Thereby, the analysis focuses especially on the interplay of parental quantity and quality decisions, introduced by Becker (1960). As it will be shown, a...

This paper analyzes whether information on high school quality published by a national newspaper affects school choice in the Netherlands. For this purpose, we use both school level and individual student level data. First, we study the causal effect of quality scores on the influx of new high...

In this paper we examine whether - conditional on other child endowments and family inputs - bilingual children achieve different language, emotional, and pro-social developmental outcomes. Our data, which allow us to analyze children's development in a dynamic framework, are extracted from the...