Economic uncertainty, parental selection, and children?s educational outcomes
Arnaud Chevalier and Olivier Marie
After the fall of the BerlinWall, East Germany experienced an unprecedented temporary drop in fertility driven by economic uncertainty. We show that the children born during this transition period performed worse on a range of educational outcomes from an early age onward. The mothers of these children exhibit personal characteristics and family structures consistent with negative parental selection. Investigating the underlying mechanisms reveals that parental educational input and emotional attachment were also lower for these children. Finally, our ability to compare siblings means that we can reject that our results stem from a time of birth effect. We thank Derek Neal and two anonymous referees for their comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. We are also grateful for feedback on previous versions of the paper from Rajeev Dehehjia, Thomas Dohmen, Nicola Fuchs-Schundeln, Gauthier Lanot, Jo?o de Mello, Christian Traxler, Tanya Wilson, Justin Wolfers, and participants at various work- ? 2017 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
1 April 2017
Journal of Political Economy 125(2) , pp.393-430, 2017
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/690830
This Journal article is published under the centre's Education programme.