There is a well-established socioeconomic gradient in cognitive test scores for children. This gradient emerges at very early ages and there is also some evidence that it can widen as children age. We investigate this phenomenon with two longitudinal cohorts of Irish children who take such tests...

The reversing achievement gap across genders observed in many countries has led to a heated debate on the persistent gap in academia and other top fields. Using Turkish administrative data and the particular institutional characteristics, this pa- per aims to analyze the gender gap in...

This paper investigates parental time investment in children prior to formal schooling as a source of intergenerational income persistence in the U.S. I develop a dynamic general equilibrium model where lifetime income endogenously persists across generations through multiple channels. My model...

Recent developments in the inequality literature has stressed the importance of inequality of opportunity as opposed to inequality of outcome. In this paper we investigate the presence of ex post inequality of opportunity in two measures of educational achievement for a representative sample of...

There are two well-established gender gaps in education. First, females tend to have higher educational attainment and achievement than males and this is particularly the case for children from less advantaged backgrounds. Second, there are large differences in the fields of specialization...

We study whether racial disparities in economic opportunity appear at an early age. Using administrative education data linked to tax records, we study the income-achievement gap across different races and find important variation. The income-achievement gap is small for East Asian children...

This paper estimates sibling correlations in cognitive and non-cognitive skills to evaluate the importance of family background for skill formation. Based on a large representative German dataset including IQ test scores and measures of non-cognitive skills, a restricted maximum likelihood model...

We analyse the role that education signals play in the transition rates from unemployment to finding a job. We compare the results for Ethnic Germans with those for foreigners from the same origin countries and Native Germans. In the first case, the two have the same labour market access but...

Cross-sectional studies show that in West Germany women with different levels of educational attainment participate differently in the labor market. In this paper, I examine one potential underlying mechanism: the re-entry of mothers in the labor market after a period of inactivity. I argue that...