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We study how children’s socio-emotional skills and well-being in adolescence are affected by an increase in the duration of parental care during infancy. Exploiting a Danish reform that extended paid parental leave in 2002 and effectively delayed children’s entry into formal out-of-home care, we show that longer leave increases adolescent well-being, conscientiousness and emotional stability, and reduces school absenteeism. The effects are strongest for children of mothers who would have taken short leave in absence of the reform. This highlights how time spent with a parent is particularly productive during very early childhood.

To limit the transmission of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), it is important to understand the sources of social behavior for members of the general public. However, there is limited research on how basic psychological dispositions interact with social contexts to shape behaviors that help mitigate contagion risk, such as social distancing. Using a sample of 89,305 individuals from 39 countries, we show that Big Five personality traits and the social context jointly shape citizens' social distancing during the pandemic. Specifically, we observed that the association between personality traits and social distancing behaviors were attenuated as the perceived societal consensus for social distancing increased. This held even after controlling for objective features of the environment such as the level of government restrictions in place, demonstrating the importance of subjective perceptions of local norms.

AB Children's educational outcomes are strongly correlated with their parents' educational attainment. This finding is often attributed to the family environment-assuming, for instance, that parents' behavior and resources affect their children's educational outcomes. However, such inferences of a causal role of the family environment depend on the largely untested assumption that such relationships do not simply reflect genes shared between parent and child. We examine this assumption with an adoptee design in full-population cohorts from Danish administrative data. We test whether parental education predicts children's educational outcomes in both biological and adopted children, looking at four components of the child's educational development: (I) the child's conscientiousness during compulsory schooling, (II) academic performance in those same years, (III) enrollment in academically challenging high schools, and (IV) graduation success. Parental education was a substantial predictor of each of these child outcomes in the full population. However, little intergenerational correlation in education was observed in the absence of genetic similarity between parent and child-that is, among adoptees. Further analysis showed that what links adoptive parents' education did have with later-occurring components such as educational attainment (IV) and enrollment (III) appeared to be largely attributable to effects identifiable earlier in development, namely early academic performance (II). The primary nongenetic mechanisms by which education is transmitted across generations may thus have their effects on children early in their educational development, even as the consequences of those early effects persist throughout the child's educational development.

Objective: Many studies have demonstrated that personality traits predict academic performance for students in high school and college. Much less evidence exists on whether the relationship between personality traits and academic performance changes from childhood to adolescence, and existing studies show very mixed findings. This study tests one hypothesis—that the importance of Agreeableness, Emotional Stability and Conscientiousness for academic performance changes fundamentally during school—against an alternative hypothesis suggesting that the changing relationships found in previous research are largely measurement artifacts. Method: We used a nationwide sample of 135,389 primary and lower‐secondary students from grade 4 to grade 8. We replicated all results in a separate sample of another 127,375 students. Results: We found that academic performance was equally strongly related to our measure of Conscientiousness at all these grade levels, and the significance of Agreeableness and Emotional Stability predominantly reflected their connections with Conscientiousness. However, age also appeared to shape the relationship between Emotional Stability and performance. Conclusion: Amidst the replication crisis in psychology these findings demonstrate a very stable and predictable relationship between personality traits and academic performance, which may have important implications for the education of children already in primary school.

We are indebted to generous feedback from many, especially Pietro Biroli, StevenDurlauf, Mette Ejrnæs, Sadegh Eshaghnia, James Heckman, Lena Janys, Søren Leth-Petersen, Elena Mat-tana, Mikkel Mertz, Nicholas Papageorge, Pia Pinger, Almudena Sevilla, Miriam Wüst, and participants atthe CEBI/VIVE workshop on “The importance of early-life circumstances: Shocks, parents and policies,”Copenhagen Education Network, the University of Copenhagen, the EALE/SOLE/AASLE World Confer-ence, the NBER Summer Institute, and the UCL/CReAM Topics in Labour Economics Workshop. MiriamGensowski acknowledges the "A good start in life" foundation for support.

Child skills are shaped by parental investments. When parents experience a health shock, their investments and therefore their children's skills may be affected. This paper estimates causal effects of severe parental health shocks on child socio-emotional skills. Drawing on a large-scale survey linked to hospital records, we find that socio-emotional skills of 11-16 year-olds are robust to parental health shocks, with the exception of significant but very small reductions in Conscientiousness. We study short-run effects with a child-fixed effects model, and dynamics around the shocks with event studies. A sibling comparison suggests some long-run build-up of effects of early shocks.

This paper examines the long-term effects of childhood disability on individuals’ educational and occupational choices, late-career labor market participation, and mortality. We merge medical records on children hospitalized with poliomyelitis during the 1952 Danish epidemic to census and administrative data, and exploit quasi-random variation in paralysis incidence in this population. While childhood disability increases the likelihood of early retirement and disability pension receipt at age 50, paralytic polio survivors are more likely to obtain a university degree and to go on to work in white-collar and computer-demanding jobs than their non-paralytic counterparts. Our results are consistent with individuals making educational and occupational choices that reflect a shift in the comparative advantage of cognitive versus physical skills. We also find that paralytic polio patients from low socioeconomic status backgrounds are more likely to die prematurely than their non-paralytic counterparts, whereas there is no effect on mortality among polio survivors from more advantaged backgrounds.

This paper estimates the eects of personality traits and IQ on lifetime earnings of the men and women of the Terman study, a high-IQ U.S. sample. Age-by-age earnings proles allow a study of when personality traits aect earnings most, and for whom the eects are strongest. I document a concave life-cycle pattern in the payos to personality traits, with the largest eects between the ages of 40 and 60. An interaction of traits with education reveals that personality matters most for highly educated men. The largest eects are found for Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Agreeableness (negative), where Conscientiousness operates partly through education, which also has signicant returns., This paper estimates the effects of personality traits and IQ on lifetime earnings of the men and women of the Terman study, a high-IQ U.S. sample. Age-by-age earnings profiles allow a study of when personality traits affect earnings most, and for whom the effects are strongest. I document a concave life-cycle pattern in the payoffs to personality traits, with the largest effects between the ages of 40 and 60. An interaction of traits with education reveals that personality matters most for highly educated men. The largest effects are found for Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Agreeableness (negative), where Conscientiousness operates partly through education, which also has significant returns.

We develop a parametrization of the multinomial probit model that yields greater insight into the underlying decision-making process, by decomposing the error terms of the utilities into latent factors and noise. The latent factors are identified without a measurement system, and they can be meaningfully linked to an economic model. We provide sufficient conditions that make this structure identified and interpretable. For inference, we design a Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler based on marginal data augmentation. A simulation exercise shows the good numerical performance of our sampler and reveals the practical importance of alternative identification restrictions. Our approach can generally be applied to any setting where researchers can specify an a priori structure on a few drivers of unobserved heterogeneity. One such example is the choice of combinations of two options, which we explore with real data on education and occupation pairs.

Economics students are used to lectures of the “chalk-and-talk” variety. In this project, I develop, describe, and evaluate a pedagogical intervention that provides students with the opportunity to practice their argumentation skills. The development of these skills is not usually part of the core curriculum. For this project, a panel discussion format is used to enable students to develop arguments using empirical evidence, and generally navigate a space where there is no single right or wrong answer. The peer-learning environment allows students to develop argumentation and evaluation skills in a setting where they receive informal formative assessment.