This article investigates the extent to which personality traits and cognitive skills can be seen as potential determinants of overeducation, and can explain the overeducation wage penalty. Using a representative survey of the Polish working-age population with well-established measures of...

A large literature establishes that cognitive and non-cognitive skills are strongly correlated with educational attainment and professional achievement. Isolating the causal effects of these traits on career outcomes is made difficult by reverse causality and selection issues. We suggest a...

A large literature establishes that cognitive and non-cognitive skills are strongly correlated with educational attainment and professional achievement. Isolating the causal effects of these traits on career outcomes is made difficult by reverse causality and selection issues. We suggest a...

Working memory capacity is a key component of executive functioning and is thought to play an important role for a wide range of cognitive and noncognitive skills such as fluid intelligence, math, reading, the inhibition of pre-potent impulses or more general self-regulation abilities. Because...

This paper uses Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data linked to administrative data to track the educational and labour market outcomes of young people. Students with lower skills have lower rates of participation in further education. While men with low skills out-earn...

Food coma, also known as postprandial somnolence, is a commonly cited reason for experiencing reduced alertness during mid-afternoon worldwide. By using exogenous variation in the timing of tests and, hence, by extension, plausibly exogenous variation in the temporal distance between an...

Although recessions negatively affect labor market outcomes, we find that individuals with greater cognitive skills have been less affected by recessions since 2000 compared to those in the 1980s and 1990s. This result occurs despite a decrease in the returns to cognitive skills over the last...

Many parents return to work, placing their child in nonparental care before the age of one. Using variations in daycare vacancy rates, we estimate the causal effects of enrollment age in universal daycare on child development. In general, we find no evidence that earlier enrollment harms early...

A large share of young mothers return to work before their child turns one year. Exploiting exogenous variation in daycare vacancy rates, we estimate the causal effects of enrollment age in universal daycare on child development for children younger than two years. We find modest effects of...

We study how the duration of paid parental leave affects the accumulation of cognitive skills among children. We use a reform which extended parental leave benefits from 12 to 15 months for Swedish children born after August 1988 to evaluate the effects of prolonged parental leave on children's...