When parents are more educated, their children tend to receive more schooling as well. Does this occur because parental ability is passed on genetically or because more educated parents provide a better environment for children to flourish? Using an intergenerational sample of families, we...

One would expect that family income is an important positive factor in the school attainment of children. However, evidence on this relationship is often tainted by the lack of control for parental ability, since at least a portion of ability is transferred genetically to children. This paper...

Overall, children in Germany live in households with below average incomes; therefore social policies that address the vulnerable position of Germany?s children are necessary. These policies should cover targeted financial transfers as well as improvements in day care provision for children....

International surveys of learning achievement and functional literacy are increasingly common. We consider two aspects of the robustness of their results. First, we compare results from four surveys: TIMSS, PISA, PIRLS and IALS. This contrasts with the standard approach which is to analyse a...

Using a representative sample of Ecuadorian young women’s households, this paper focuses on the role played by education in shaping fertility choices and labor market participation. Education, which is found to be endogenous with respect to teenage childbearing, is instrumented by a reform...

There is relatively little research on peer effects in teenage motherhood despite the fact that peer effects, and in particular social interaction within the family, are likely to be important. We estimate the impact of an elder sister’s teenage fertility on the teenage childbearing of their...

In this paper we use household survey data to study the determinants of children’s educational achievement in Uruguay. As an indicator of this educational achievement, we build the “educational gap” which is the difference between expected years of schooling of a child and actual years of...