We analyse the impact on schooling outcomes of growing up in a family headed by a single mother. Growing up in a non-intact family in Germany is associated with worse outcomes in models that do not control for possible correlations between common unobserved determinants of family structure and...

This paper provides a new explanation for the narrowing and reversal of the gender education gap. It highlights the indirect effect of returns to human capital on parents' preferences for sons and the resulting demand for children and education. We assume that parents maximize the full income of...

In this paper we measure the effect of entering preelementary school at age 2 rather than 3 in France. Our identification strategy relies on ratios between the number of young children and the capacity of preelementary schools observed at the very local level. This information allows us to solve...

Many countries are currently expanding access to child care for young children. But are all children equally likely to benefit from such expansions? We address this question by adopting a marginal treatment effects framework. We study the West German setting where high quality center-based care...

We analyze interaction effects of birth weight and the business cycle at birth on individual cardiovascular (CV) mortality later in life. In addition, we examine to what extent these long-run effects run by way of cognitive ability and education and to what extent those mitigate the long-run...

Performance-related pay for teachers is being introduced in many countries, but there is little evaluation to date on the effects of such programmes. This Paper evaluates a particular incentive experiment. The incentive program is a rank-order tournament among teachers of English, Hebrew, and...

Parents with higher education levels have children with higher education levels. Is this because parental education actually changes the outcomes of children, suggesting an important spillover of education policies, or is it merely that more able individuals who have higher education also have...

This paper combines a randomized experiment and a structural model to test whether monitoring and financial incentives can reduce teacher absence and increase learning. In 57 schools in India, randomly chosen out of 113, a teacher’s daily attendance was verified through photographs with time...

In the rural areas of developing countries, teacher absence is a widespread problem. This paper tests whether a simple incentive program based on teacher presence can reduce teacher absence, and whether it has the potential to lead to more teaching activities and better learning. In 60 informal...

We develop a model that gives some microfoundation to the impact of residential neighborhood on children’s educational attainment and then test it using the UK National Child Development Study. We find that, for high-educated parents, the better the quality of the neighborhood in terms of...