Does Protestantism favour the market economy more than Catholicism does? We provide a novel quasi-experimental way to answer this question by comparing Protestant and Catholic minorities using Swiss census data from 1970 to 2000. Exploiting the strong adhesion of religious minorities to their...

We suggest a methodology for identifying the implications of alternative cultural and social norms embodied by religious denomination on labour market outcomes, by estimating the differential impact of Protestantism versus Catholicism on the propensity to be an entrepreneur, on the basis of the...

We estimate the causal effects of regular and occasional grandchild care on the depression of grandmothers and grandfathers, using data from the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe and an instrumental variables strategy which exploits the variation in the timing of interviews...

In this report we investigate the effects of vocational education and training (VET) on adult skills and labour market outcomes by using the PIAAC survey. Data comparability across countries, the breath of countries involved, and the almost unique presence of information on assessed skills,...

We show that, when school quality is measured by the educational standard and attaining the standard requires costly effort, secondary education needs not be a hierarchy with private schools offering better quality than public schools, as in Epple and Romano, 1998. An alternative configuration,...

Motivated by anecdotal as well as econometric evidence from Italy, we ask whether private schools can provide lower quality than public schools. Using a stylized model of the education market with sequential entry of a public and a private school, we show that, depending on the underlying...