infonet-economy

Does birthright citizenship boost immigrant children's participation
and success in the host country's educational system? We address this
question using a reform of the German naturalization law in 1999 that
entitled children born after January 1, 2000 to birthright citizenship.
We use a difference-in-difference design that compares children born...

What happens to children's long-run cognitive development when introducing universal high-quality childcare for 3-year-olds mainly crowds out family care? To answer this question, we take advantage of a sizeable expansion of publicly subsidized full-time high-quality childcare for 3-year-olds in Spain in the early 1990s. Identification relies on variation in the initial speed of...

More children than ever attend center-based care early in life. We study whether children who attend center-based care before age 3 have better or worse language and motor skills, socio-emotional maturity, and school readiness just before entering primary school. In data covering about 36,000 children in one West German state, we use a marginal treatment effects framework to show how...

Using a simulation design that is based on empirical data, a recent study by Huber, Lechner and Wunsch (2012) finds that distance-weighted radius matching with bias adjustment as proposed in Lechner, Miquel and Wunsch (2011) is competitive among a broad range of propensity score-based estimators used to correct for mean differences due to observable covariates. In this paper, we...

Les réformes de société peuvent parfois produire des effets indésirables. Il est possible d'illustrer ce constat en examinant deux réformes récentes dans le domaine de la politique sociale et familiale. Motivées par un souci de promouvoir l'égalité entre les sexes, ces réformes ont créé des incitations contradictoires. L'explication réside notamment dans la coexistence...

Socio-economic shocks during early childhood are predicted to have detrimental short- and long-run consequences for children's development. We examine this hypothesis using a specific shock: housing damages caused by a super-typhoon. Comparing children, who lived in the same district, but only some experienced housing damages, we can isolate the real-estate shock from any...

This paper proposes a novel approach to portfolio revision. The current literature
on portfolio optimization uses a somewhat naïve approach, where portfolio weights are always completely revised after a predefined fixed period. However, one shortcoming of this procedure is that it ignores parameter uncertainty in the estimated portfolio weights, as well as the biasedness of the...

The nonparametric identification of the local average treatment effect (LATE) hinges on the satisfaction of three instrumental variable assumptions: (1) unconfounded assignment of the instrument, (2) no average direct effect of the instrument on the outcome within compliance types (exclusion restriction), and (3) weak monotonicity of the treatment in the instrument. While (1) often...