We examine how parental health shocks affect children's non-cognitive skills. Based on a German mother-and-child data base, we draw on significant changes in self-reported parental health as an exogenous source of health variation to identify effects on outcomes for children at ages of three and...

This study examines cognitive and non-cognitive skills and their transmission from parents to children as one potential candidate to explain the intergenerational link of socio-economic status. Using representative data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, we contrast the impact of...

Self-productivity is a crucial feature in the process of skill formation. It means that skills and health acquired at one stage in the life cycle enhance skills and health formation at later stages. This paper presents an empirical investigation of self-productivity in early childhood in...

Complementing prior research on income mobility and educational transmission, we provide evidence on the intergenerational transmission of cognitive abilities using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study. Our estimates suggest that individuals' cognitive skills are positively related to...

It is well known that individuals' risk attitudes are related to behavioral outcomes such as smoking, portfolio decisions, and also educational attainment, but there is barely any evidence on whether parental risk attitudes affect the educational attainment of dependent children. We add to this...

This paper investigates the effect of education on fertility under inflexible labor market conditions. We exploit exogenous variation from a German compulsory schooling reform to deal with the endogeneity of education. By using data from two complementary data sets, we examine different...

This paper investigates the association between maternal life satisfaction and the developmental functioning of two- to three-year-old children as well as the socio-emotional behavior of five- to six-year-old children. We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), which allows...

In this paper we analyse the association between maternal well-being and child development at different ages. We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) which captures maternal life satisfaction and numerous cognitive and non-cognitive child development outcomes. We identify a...

Starting in 2009, the German state of Saxony distributed sports club membership vouchers among all 33,000 third graders in the state. The policy's objective was to encourage them to develop a long-term habit of exercising. In 2018, we carried out a large register-based survey among several...

Does a high regional concentration of immigrants of the same ethnicity affect immigrant children's acquisition of host-country language skills and educational attainment? We exploit the exogenous placement of guest workers from five ethnicities across German regions during the 1960s and 1970s in...