We examine the effect of single motherhood on children’s secondary school track choice using 12-year-old children drawn from the German Socio-Economic Panel. In line with previous studies for the U.S., the U.K. and Sweden, we find a negative correlation between single motherhood and...

In present day Germany, one in seven children is raised in a single parent household. We investigate the effect of single parenthood on children’s educational attainment, measured by the school track at the age 14, using ordered probit models. We study whether the effect of living in single...

This paper argues that assortative matching may explain over-education. Education determines individuals' income and, due to the presence of assortative matching, the quality of the partner, who can be a colleague or a spouse. Thus an individual acquires some education to improve the expected...

We make the novel argument that time spent on household chores can possibly reflect racial discrimination based on color. Our model, based on Becker's theory of allocation of time and his theory of marriage, recognizes that both intra-household bargaining and hedonic marriage markets operating...

Using data we collected in rural Burkina Faso, we examine how children's cognitive abilities influence resource constrained households' decisions to invest in their education. We use a direct measure of child ability for all primary school-aged children, regardless of current school enrollment....

Using data from the Bicol region of the Philippines, we examine why women are more educated than men in a rural, agricultural economy in which women are significantly less likely than men to participate in the labor market. We hypothesize that educational homogamy in the marriage market and...

More and more children do not grow up in traditional nuclear families. Instead, they grow up in single-parent households or in families with a step-parent. Hence, it is important to improve our understanding of the impact of "shocks" in family structure due to parental relationship dissolution...

This paper examines how assortative matching affects graduate earnings through the choice of attending university. We build up a model where individuals decide whether to attend university for increasing both their future income and the probability to marry an educated partner. The theoretical...

A substantial and growing fraction of children across Europe and the US live in single parent households. Law practices are evolving to encourage both parents to maintain contact with their children following parental separation/divorce, driven by the belief that such contact is in the best...

In this paper, we employ register data for eight cohorts of second-generation immigrant pupils to identify the impact of each parent's years since migration on their children's school achievements. We exploit local variation in years since migration and within-family variation. We find evidence...