We consider the effects of daytime fasting by pregnant women during the lunar month of Ramadan on their children's test scores at age seven. Using English register data, we find that scores are .05 to .08 standard deviations lower for Pakistani and Bangladeshi students exposed to Ramadan in...

We use event-study models based on staggered summer vacations in Germany to estimate the effect of school re-openings after the summer of 2021 on the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Estimations are based on daily counts of confirmed coronavirus infections across all 401 German counties. Our results are...

Does retirement lead to a short, transitory health boost, followed by a stable longer-run effect? The short-run effect has been hypothesized to be a kind of honeymoon effect, that is followed by a longer-run effect that may be either positive or negative. We examine the time path of the health...

Becoming a grandparent is one of the major life transitions experienced by older individuals. Using data from ten Western European countries, we show that grandparenthood on average leads to a reduction in well-being while hardly impacting physical, cognitive and mental health. Effects are...

Previous research shows that ethnic minority students perform poorer in school when they are taught by ethnic majority teachers. Why this is the case was unclear. This paper focuses on one important potential explanation: I examine whether ethnic majority teachers grade minority and majority...

Each year, many pregnant Muslim women fast during Ramadan. Using Indonesian cross-sectional data and building upon work of Almond & Mazumder (2009), I show that people who were prenatally exposed to Ramadan fasting have a poorer general health than others. As predicted by medical theory, this...

Recent studies for primary and secondary education find positive effects of the share of girls in the classroom on achievement of boys and girls. This study examines whether these results can be extrapolated to post-secondary education. We conduct an experiment in which the shares of girls in...

This study reports a meta-analysis on the effects of ethnic minority share in school on achievement test scores. Best evidence from the studies that have appeared thus far on this topic shows that these compositional effects appear small in general, but may be larger when the ethnic minority...

Each year, many pregnant women fast from dawn to sunset during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Medical theory suggests that this may have negative long-term health effects on their offspring. Building upon the work of Almond & Mazumder (2008), and using Indonesian cross-sectional data, I show...