This study evaluates a comprehensive university access program that provides financial, academic and social support to low socioeconomic students using a natural experiment which exploits the time variation in the expansion of the program across high schools. Overall, we find positive treatment...

This paper investigates whether teenagers are educationally advantaged if their parents are educators, using data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) for Great Britain and Ireland from 2000. Examining whether teachers’ children do better at tests of reading ability,...

This paper uses a cross-country representative sample of Europeans over the age of 50 to analyse whether individuals’ religiosity is associated with higher levels of well-being as a large number of studies by mental health researchers and economists have suggested. It is shown that in simple...

How does implementing harsh economic reforms influence voting behaviour? And how do the patterns of political support change over the course of transition? We analyse these issues using data from a sequence of 11 opinion surveys conducted in the Czech Republic between 1990-98. We find that -...

This paper investigates the robustness of recent findings on the effect of parental background on child health. We are particularly concerned with the extent to which their finding that income effects on child health are the result of spurious correlation rather than some causal mechanism. A...