We aim to examine how previous unemployment affects future unemployment and career complexity over the life course. Theory suggests that unemployment triggers negative chains of ‘low-pay-no-pay’ circles. Using longitudinal data on men aged 18-64 from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we...

The negative effect of childbirth on mothers' labour supply is well documented, though most studies examine only the short-term effects. This study uses retrospective life history data for Germany the Netherlands and Great Britain to investigate the long-term effects of childbirth on mothers'...

We investigate the association between adult health and the income inequality they experienced as children up to 80 years earlier. Our inequality data track shares of national income held by top percentiles from 1913 to 2009. We average those data over the same early-life years and merge them to...

We exploit migration patterns from the UK to Australia and the US to investigate whether a person's decision to smoke is determined by culture. For each country, we use retrospective data to describe individual smoking trajectories over the life-course. For the UK, we use these trajectories to...

We combine survey data on British and German immigrants in the US with data on natives in Britain and Germany to estimate the causal effect of migration on educational mobility through cross-national marriage. To control for selective mating, we instrument educational attainment using government...

The extant literature on cultural transmission takes competing cultures in society as given and parental cultural preferences as fixed. We relax these assumptions by endogenizing both societal and parental preferences. We use smoking as a case-study of a cultural trait which did not always...