State and federal reforms of the 1990s transformed the U.S. cash assistance program forsingle parents and their children. Despite an extensive literature examining these changesand their impacts, there have been few studies that consider the effects of these reformsfrom the perspective of the...

Demographic change will be one of the major challenges for economic policy in the developed world in the next decades. In this article, we analyze the relationship between age structure and the number of startups. We argue that an individual's decision to start a business is determined by his or...

Pay-as-you-go pension programs can help to share risk amongst generations.While a wage-indexed pension program is best suited to share labor income risk,I show that the combination of stochastic labor income and stochastic populationgrowth may reduce the possibilities for intergenerational risk...

Despite important policy implications associated with the allocation of education resources, evidence on the effectiveness of school inputs remains inconclusive. In part, this is due to endogenous allocation; families sort themselves non-randomly into school districts and school districts...

This paper explores the links between school, family and areabackground influences during adolescence and later adult economicoutcomes. The empirical analysis is based on data covering the period1979 to 1996, drawn from the 1979 US National Longitudinal Survey ofYouth. For a sample of...

This paper estimates the impact of peer achievement and variance on math achievement growth. It exploits exogenous variation in peer characteristics generated at the transition to upper-secondary school in a sample of Berlin fifth graders. Parents and schools are barely able to condition their...

Gaps in welfare attainment between boys and girls in China have attractedinternational attention. In this paper demand analysis is used to try and uncoverthe factors which may be driving the emergence of these gender gaps.Drawing on household expenditure data from a poor (Sichuan) and rich...

We study the effects of random assignment to coeducational andsingle-sex classes on the academic performance of female highschool students. Our estimation results show that single-sexschooling improves the performance of female students inmathematics. This positive effect increases if the...

Tens of thousands of young people leave school with no or very few qualifications inEngland. This paper seeks to build a fuller picture of Key Stage 4 low achievementand its correlates than available hitherto. We focus on three aspects. Firstly, the role ofstudents’ personal characteristics,...

Parental involvement in their children’s lives can have a lasting impact on wellbeing.More involved parents convey to their children that they are interested intheir development, and this in turn signals to the child that their future is valued.However, what happens in socio-economically...