This paper presents the results of a randomized study of a home visiting program implemented in Germany for low-income, first-time mothers. A major goal of the program is to improve the participants' economic self-sufficiency and family planning. I use administrative data from the German social...

Building on recent analyses that find a sizeable, overall gender wage gap in Azerbaijan's workforce, this paper uses data on young workers in their early years in the labor market to understand how gender wage gaps evolve over time, if at all. Using a unique database from a survey of young...

This paper adds to the literature on extracurricular early childhood education and child development by exploiting unique data on an educational project in Germany, the Junior University (JU). Utilizing a quasi-experimental study design, we estimate the causal short-run effect of JU enrollment...

This study analyses which individual and institutional factors (causally) influence individuals in their educational career and in their choice for an occupation. Chapter 2 explores consequences of parental separation for cognitive skill development of children. In the year before parental...

In this paper we use a parental leave reform directed towards fathers to identify the causal effects of paternity leave on children's and parents' outcomes. We document that paternity leave causes fathers to become more important for children's cognitive skills. School performance at age 16...

In 1998 the Norwegian government introduced a program that substantially increased parents' incentives to stay home with children under the age of three. Many eligible children had older siblings, and we investigate how this program affected long-run educational outcomes of the older siblings....

We estimate effects of child care center staff composition on early child development. During the years our data covers, child care centers in Oslo were oversubscribed, and child care slots were allocated through a lottery. This allow us to explore how staff education, experience and stability,...

We examine the relationship between parental ethnic identity and cognitive development in ethnic minority children. This aspect of parental identity may shape children's cognitive outcomes through a direct influence on parenting behaviour, or by mediating parental access to social resources....

In this paper, I use a unique dataset linking administrative school data with birth records to quantify the importance of time-varying family factors for child achievement and time use. Specifically, I take a model of academic achievement commonly used in the test score literature, and I augment...

A key challenge in developing countries interested in providing early childhood development programs at scale is whether these programs can be effectively delivered through existing public service infrastructures. We present the results of a randomized experiment evaluating the effects of a...