The death of a child is a devastating and life-altering event for the entire family, extending beyond the initial grief and shaping the short and long-term life trajectories of the surviving siblings and parents. Although a growing literature documents its negative impact on parental outcomes, very little is known about its causal impact on the human capital accumulation of surviving siblings. This paper examines the effect of losing a sibling during childhood on educational outcomes, using detailed register data from the entire population of Finland. I exploit the timing of an unexpected sibling loss relative to the time of 9th-grade GPA measurement. I find that losing a sibling 2 years before the 9th grade has a negative impact of 19% of a standard deviation on the 9th-grade GPA. The effect is more pronounced and prevalent across different ages at the time of sibling loss for children with a lower socioeconomic background. Further, I find a 12-14 percentage points decrease in the probability of general track choice in the upper-secondary school following a sibling loss. Exploring potential mechanisms, I find notable negative mental health effects on both surviving children and their parents, along with adverse effects on the labor market outcomes for mothers. These findings highlight the large social and economic consequences of such losses, emphasizing the need for targeted policies to support bereaved family members.

Online learning resources have become extremely popular, particularly after the restrictions caused by the Covid-19 outbreak. In this paper, we use data at the individual level from an online math learning platform which is used by children from over 100 countries, to document the gender differences in parental investment in the context of online learning. We quantify the gender gaps in effort and relative performance outcomes and analyze whether the gaps differ by the gender of the parent who mainly supervises the children. Our main results suggest small gender gaps in effort outcomes but larger gender gaps in relative performance outcomes, both in favor of boys. The effort gaps are narrower or positive in favor of girls for children mainly supervised by their mothers. Further, we find that living in municipalities with more egalitarian gender norms is associated with narrower or positive gender gaps in effort outcomes while we do not find such difference for the relative performance outcomes. Our results hold when we compare outcomes of siblings of opposite genders, controlling for parent fixed effects. Taking into account the increase in use of online learning tools and their progressive integration in the regular educational system, our results provide important information to minimize gender biases in these new settings.

Social movements and democratization processes affect societies across different dimensions, including women's empowerment. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the Arab Spring movements — a series of uprisings and protests in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) — on the economic empowerment of young immigrant women in Spain with MENA-origin parents. First, we show that female MENA immigrants become more progressive in their beliefs and aspirations, compared to their non-MENA counterparts, following the Arab Spring. However, we do not find any effect on the beliefs and aspirations of male MENA immigrants. Next, focusing on second-generation immigrants who have been exposed to economic and political institutions in Spain throughout their lives, we explore the impact of the Arab Spring movements on their education and labor market outcomes, isolated from the institutional changes, and driven by shifts in beliefs and aspirations. We find an increase in educational attainment and the probability of being in formal education for second-generation MENA females living in Spain after the Arab Spring. Also, we find a decrease in the probability of being NEET (not in education, employment, or training), and in the probability of being employed for MENA females, while we do not observe any significant change in the outcomes of MENA males.

work-in-progress

work-in-progress

This study aims to analyze how neighborhood safety affects labor market outcomes and commuting behaviour of the females in the United States, and reveals significant correlations even after controlling for many different individual or neighborhood specific characteristics. Individual-level analysis suggests that a decrease in the safety perception is associated with longer working hours, lower earnings, a reduced probability of commuting by car and a higher probability of commuting by public transportation for females. Aggregate neighborhood-level analysis shows that the per-capita rate of sex crimes is negatively associated with female labor force participation, employment probability and the ratio of females commuting by public transportation. Additionally, in neighborhoods with higher per capita sex crime rates, aggregate female earnings are higher. Lastly, analysis of labor flow outcome suggests that not only the number of crimes in the residential neighborhood, but also the number of crimes in the workplace neighborhood matters.

This study aims to investigate how major specific quota and labor market outcomes are associated with the college major choice of students, reflected by average rankings. We use a large scale nationwide data from Student Selection and Placement Centre (OSYM) which contains information on all the students in Turkey who are placed into an undergraduate program and data from Household Labor Force Statistics conducted by Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK). Results from both national and regional analysis show that an increase in the major specific quota, real wage and employment probability is associated with an increase in the ranking of that major, which can be interpreted as an increase in demand, while an increase in major specific unemployment rate is associated with a decrease in ranking. National labor market outcomes are found to be more effective than the regional labor market outcomes on the major choice of the students. We find that students respond relatively more to unemployment rate information on their major choice than wages and employment probability. Our findings also suggest that unfavorable macroeconomic conditions lead to lower rankings, while university programs in more developed regions and the majors with a high share of English Medium Instruction (EMI) display higher rankings.

One popular indicator of the quality of a country’s exports is the so-called “export sophistication index”, or EXPY, which measures the “average income” or “productivity” of the products in a country’s export basket. The higher is a country’s EXPY, the more a country’s export basket looks like that of a rich country. Evidence presented in this brief shows that after a period of rapid increase between 2002-2007, the growth rate of Turkey’s EXPY has slowed down in the period 2008-2015. We inquire whether the changes in Turkey’s export destinations over the last few years, namely the increase in the share of Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries at the expense of countries in Europe and North America (ENA) provide an explanation. We find that the relatively rapid increase in Turkey’s EXPY in the 2002-2007 period is associated with an increase in the EXPY to ENA; EXPY to ENA remains almost constant after 2008. It turns out that EXPY of exports to MENA was relatively higher to start with and has remained relatively stable over time. Changes in regions’ shares in exports, though quite significant in themselves, seem to have played a minor role in the relatively rapid increase and consequent slowdown of the overall sophistication of Turkey’s exports.