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Marriage, the Risk of Overeducation, and Selection into Both: Evidence from Germany

Two competing theories of social support and role specialization have been invoked to explain how marital status affects labour market outcomes. Whereas evidence of beneficial labour market outcomes among married men and employed married women favours a social support perspective, evidence of married women’s reduced labour market participation corresponds to a role specialization perspective. We make ...

The Long-Run Effects of Sports Club Vouchers for Primary School Children

Childhood obesity is one of the most serious public health challenges of the 21st century. While small-scale experiments change behaviors among adults in the short-run, we know little about the effectiveness of large-scale policies or the longer-run impacts due to habit formation among children. To nudge primary school children into a long-term habit of exercising, the German state of Saxony distributed ...

The Impact of Price Display on Financial Decisions

Credit decisions play an important role for the economic wellbeing of households. However, the complexity of products and varying price information display makes it hard for consumers to navigate this field. Empirical evidence has important implications for consumer protection policies, as many people fail to make optimal choices for themselves and struggle to understand credit cost information. Presenting ...

Consumer Debt: Many Borrowers Unaware of Their Interest Rates; Cost Display Influences Likelihood of Accepting Credit Scenario

The consumer debt of households in Germany totals in the triple-digit billions and is characterized by a wide range of interest rates. Despite the high volume of debt, many people do not know the terms of their consumer credit contracts. This report analyzes new survey data on general knowledge about typical forms of consumer credit, such as the overdraft facility and consumer loans. Women tend to ...

Heterogeneous Effects of After-School Care on Child Development

It is often argued that institutionalized after-school care (ASC) can benefit children lacking adequate homework support at home and, hence, foster equality of opportunity. However, despite considerable policy interest, it is unclear whether these afternoon programs are beneficial for child development and if selection into them is efficient, i.e., whether students benefiting most from the programs ...

Financial Education Affects Financial Knowledge and Downstream Behaviors

We study the rapidly growing literature on the causal effects of financial education programs in a meta-analysis of 76 randomized experiments with a total sample size of over 160,000 individuals. Many of these experiments are published in top economics and finance journals. The evidence shows that financial education programs have, on average, positive causal treatment effects on financial knowledge ...

Financial Education is Effective and Efficient

The Long-Run Effects of Sports Club Vouchers for Primary School Children

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 cohorts in Saxony and two neighboring states. Our difference-indifferences estimations show that, even after a ...

Building Health across Generations: Unraveling the Impact of Early Childcare on Maternal Health

In contemporary households, women often shoulder most organisation and caregiving responsibilities leading them to play a crucial role in family dynamics. While previous research has established that public early childcare affects child outcomes and maternal employment, less attention has been given to its effects on maternal health despite its relevance within the household. This study investigates ...

Income-Based Family Typology and Child Development: Evidence from the UK

Our paper contributes to the literature studying how household conditions can influence children’s development, focusing on the type of family model where children grow up, defined on the basis of parental employment status and relative earnings. The traditional “male-breadwinner” model is no longer the only type of family that has been observed throughout recent decades; the “dual-breadwinner” family ...