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...

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 article examines the extent to which early childhood socioeconomic differences emerge in hyperactivity, impulsivity and persistence, all of which are psychometric analogues to how economists conceptualise time discounting. We control for a wide range of factors including parental investment...

We analyse support for EU membership as expressed in voting patterns in the candidate countries’ referenda on EU membership, using regional referendum results and individual survey data on voting intentions. We find that favourable individual and regional characteristics are positively...

This Paper utilizes a unique dataset on votes cast by Czech and Polish migrants in their recent national elections to investigate the impact of institutional, political and economic characteristics on migrants’ voting behaviour. The political preferences of migrants are strikingly different...

Policy discussions to ameliorate socioeconomic (SES) inequalities are increasingly focused on investments in early childhood. Yet such interventions are costly to implement, and clear evidence on the optimal time to intervene to yield a high economic and social return in the future is meagre....

The literature on skill formation and human capital development clearly demonstrates that early investment in children is an equitable and efficient policy with large returns in adulthood. Yet little is known about the mechanisms involved in producing these long-term effects. This paper presents...