Many countries around the world are making substantial and increasing public investments in children by providing resources for schooling from early years through to adolescence. Recent research has looked at how parents respond to children's schooling opportunities, highlighting that public...

This report considers the extent to which differences in parental characteristics explain gaps in cognitive and socio-emotional development between children at older ages. It documents and explores the differences between children born to cohabiting and married couples for a range of other...

This paper uses data from a rich UK birth cohort to estimate the differences in cognitive and non-cognitive skills between children born at the start and end of the academic year. It builds on the previous literature on this topic in England by using a more robust regression discontinuity design...

Children born at the end of the academic year have lower educational attainment, on average, than those born at the start of the academic year. Previous research has shown that the difference is most pronounced early in pupils' school lives, but remains evident and statistically significant in...

We study the impact on young children's bodyweight of switching from means-tested to universal provision of nutritious free school meals in England, exploiting identifying variation in the timing of weight measurements. We show that exposure to high quality universal free lunches increases...

This paper estimates the causal effects of breastfeeding on early child development using exogenous variation in breastfeeding support policies across UK maternity hospitals. Based on data from the Millennium Cohort Study, we find that mothers giving birth in hospitals where such policies are...