In this paper, we study the socio-economic determinants of birth weight with a focus on the mother s family status. We use Austrian birth register data covering all births between 1984 and 2007 and find that a mother s marriage is associated with a higher birth weight of the newborn in a range...

This paper explores the capability of the state to affect the individual?s decision to work for free. For this purpose we combine individual-level data from the European and World Values Survey with macroeconomic and political variables for OECD member countries. Empirically we identify three...

This paper interprets accidents occurring on the way to and from work as negative health shocks to identify the causal effect of health on labor market outcomes. We argue that in our sample of exactly matched treated and control workers, these health shocks are quasi-randomly assigned. A...

Using a matched insurant-general practitioner panel data set, we estimated the effect of a general health-screening program on individuals health status and health care cost. To account for selection into treatment, we used regional variations in the intensity of exposure to supply-determined...

Prior empirical research on the theoretically proposed interaction between the quantity and the quality of children builds on exogenous variation in family size due to twin births and focuses on human capital outcomes. The typical finding can be described as a statistically nonsignificant...

Little is known about the response behavior of parents whose children are exposed to an early-life shock. In this paper we interpret the prenatal exposure of the Austrian 1986 cohort to radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident as a negative human capital shock and examine their parents...

Seguino (2000) shows that gender wage discrimination in export-oriented semi-industrialized countries might be fostering investment and growth in general. While the original analysis does not have internationally comparable wage discrimination data, we replicate the analysis using data from a...

We study the contribution of health-related behaviors to the health-education gradient by distinguishing between short-run and long-run mediating effects: while in the former only current or lagged behaviors are taken into account, in the latter we consider the entire history of behaviors. We...

This paper analyzes patterns in the earnings development of young labor market entrants over their life cycle. We identify four distinctly different types of transition patterns between discrete earnings states in a large administrative data set. Further, we investigate the effects of labor...

Decomposing wages into worker and firm wage components, we find that firm-fixed components (firm rents) are sizeable parts of workers' wages. If workers can only imperfectly observe the extent of firm rents in their wages, they might be mislead about the overall wage distribution. Such...