The impact of four labour market policies – employment protection legislation, minimum wages, parental leave and unemployment benefits – on productivity is examined here, using annual cross-country aggregate data on these policies and industry-level data on productivity from 1979 to 2003. We use a ‘difference-in-differences’ framework, which exploits likely differences in the productivity effect […]

[…] suggests that there exist important social returns over and above the private returns to education usually studied by economists. This paper examines whether schooling has a positive impact on individual’s political interest, voting turnout, democratic values, political involvement and political group membership, using the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS). Years of schooling are found […]

[…] who are young and tall, while men are more attracted to women who are young and thin. We also find that partner’s education and occupation have an impact on desirability, irrespective of gender. Second, there is mild positive sorting in dating preferences along a number of characteristics. Women and men prefer partners of similar […]

[…] across jobs and simply accumulated with time spent in the labor market. In this case, labor market shocks like a job loss do not have a major impact on fertility if they are transitory and have small effects on lifetime income. In considering the fertility response to job displacement we depart from this framework […]

[…] of increasing the childbearing of these households. While many studies have looked at the importance of WFTC on the female labor supply, only few have estimated the impact it had on fertility decisions of British families. This paper employs the 1995 to 2003 British Household Panel Survey and identifies the policy impact of WFTC […]

[…] propensity score matching, we find that those households having children between the recorded waves have considerably worse outcomes in terms of changes in consumption expenditure. The negative impact is however, highly heterogeneous, and varies substantially with education for instance. We then demonstrate how one can make an assessment of the potential effect from omitting […]

[…] can give very useful insights into the cognitive process of answering questions, the social dynamics that develop in an interview context and the way these dynamics ultimately impact data quality. Behaviour coding is a technique used to code such interactions. Despite its long-standing use, little is written about the procedures to be followed while […]

This paper considers the impact of tobacco consumption on wages in the UK using data from fifteen waves of the British Household Panel Survey. Considering both overall smoker status as well as the number of cigarettes consumed, we provide estimates for the smoking wage penalty using standard regression methods, including panel estimators for fixed […]

[…] increasing interest in understanding the effect of pregnancy-specific behaviors like dieting, smoking and alcohol consumption on birth outcomes and subsequent development. In this paper we estimate the impact of parental inputs, such as parental smoking and mother’s employment during pregnancy, on children’s birth weight and fetal growth. Biomedical and epidemiological studies which have estimated […]