We investigate the effects of antenatal maternal vaccination against tetanus on the schooling attained by children in Bangladesh. Maternal vaccination prevents the child from acquiring tetanus at birth through blood infection and substantially reduces infant mortality and may prevent impairment in children who would otherwise acquire tetanus but survive. We follow up on a 1974 randomized trial ...

Negative relations between women’s schooling and fertility have been observed by social scientists, leading some of them to propose education as a policy tool for family planning. Both fertility and schooling are, however, choice variables that may be affected by some common factors. Thiswould thenmake schooling endogenous, and consequently, the observed negative relationshipsmight not be causa...

We investigate the effects of age-related factors and formal instruction on the development of reading-related skills in children aged four and seven years. Age effects were determined by comparing two groups of children at the onset of formal schooling; one aged seven (laterschooled) and one aged four (earlier-schooled). Schooling effects were measured by comparing the later-schooled group wit...

Studies on the intergenerational transmission of human capital usually assume a one-way spillover from parents to children. However, children may also affect their parents' human capital. Using exogenous variation in education, arising from a Swedish compulsory schooling reform in the 1950s and 1960s, we address this question by studying the causal effect of children's schooling on their parent...

Armed Conflict and Schooling: Evidence from the 1994 Rwandan Genocide To examine the impact of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide on children’s schooling, the authors combine two cross-sectional household surveys collected before and after the genocide. The identification strategy uses pre-war data to control for an age group’s baseline schooling and exploits variation across provinces in the intensity of ...

I illustrate the variety of approaches to development issues microeconomists employ, focusing on studies that illuminate and quantify the major mechanisms posited by growth theorists who highlight the role of education in fostering growth. I begin with a basic issue: what are the returns to schooling? I discuss microeconomic studies that estimate schooling returns using alternative approaches t...

This paper examines the expansion of compulsory schooling in fifteen Western European countries over the period 1950-2000. We show that a convergence process of mandatory years of schooling has occurred across these countries since 1950. We argue that the major driver of this phenomenom is the existence of decreasing aggregate returns to education that have limited the extension of compulsory s...

In 1968, the Taiwanese government extended compulsory education from six to nine years and opened over 150 new junior high schools at a differential rate among regions. Within each region, we exploit variations across cohorts in new junior high school openings to construct an instrument for schooling and employ it to estimate the causal effects of mother's or father's schooling on infant birth ...

Fish schooling behavior may spawn unmanned underwater vehicle schooling.

Loss of a parent is one of the most traumatic events a child can face. If loss of a parent reduces investments in children, it can also have long-lasting implications. This study uses parametric and semi-nonparametric matching techniques to estimate how one human capital investment, school enrollment, is affected by a parent's recent death. We analyze data from 600,000 households from Indonesia...