Early childhood education and care (ECEC) has been found to be beneficial for the development of children below three years. However, many children do not attend ECEC facilities. Frequently, structural family characteristics (SFC), such as migration background, educational attainment and income, are used to explain differing probabilities of…

The COVID-19 pandemic substantially affected the lives of mothers. This study seeks to investigate the stress that mothers experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic and their self-efficacy as parents in managing the impact of the disease. The study gathered longitudinal data from 603 German mothers (M[subscript age] = 40.5 years) with children…

Studies on youth participation tend to characterize youth as either active and trustful or as passive and alienated. This cross-national and longitudinal study examines patterns of citizenship orientations characterized by both manifest and latent involvement differentiated by one's position toward institutional politics (trustful or distrustful)…

This study examines the influence of family income on student achievement in mathematics utilising data from the parents' questionnaire for nine countries participating in the OECD's 2012 PISA study. It finds non-trivial effects for family income that were consistently larger than, or comparable to, the effects of more commonly used measures of…

This study investigates whether children's preschool experiences are associated with later achievement via enhanced learning behaviors using data from a German longitudinal study following children (N = 554) from age 3 in preschool to age 8 in second grade. There were two main findings. First, results suggest that more positive learning behaviors…

Compared to unpaid leave, paid family leave may better help working parents balance the competing needs of job and family early in a child's life, among other advantages. Yet the United States remains one of only two countries in the world without a statutory national paid maternity leave policy, and one of the only high-income countries that…

Respondent incentives are widely used to increase response rates, but their effect on nonresponse bias has not been researched as much. To contribute to the research, we analyze an incentive experiment embedded within the third wave of the German household panel survey "Panel Labor Market and Social Security" conducted by the German…

Inclusive education often refers to a school model wherein students with special needs (SEN) spend most of their school time with students without special needs. According to literature, for the implementation of inclusion, the attitudes towards inclusive education as well as the perception of inclusive teaching practices and resources are…

In this article, I investigate preschool children's participation in organised activities. Current political and academic debates consider informal education as a prime vehicle for potentially diminishing social class inequalities in educational outcomes before school entry. However, studies point to unequal participation rates between social…

This paper focuses on the influence of socio-economic risk factors and different aspects of the home learning environment in early childhood on children's language competencies (vocabulary and grammar skills). The assumption is that children with more risk factors have lower competencies, but the home learning environment (measured by everyday…

We present three statistical methods for causal analysis in life course research that are able to take into account the order of events and their possible causal relationship: a cross-lagged model, a latent growth model (LGM), and a synthesis of the two, an autoregressive latent trajectories model (ALT). We apply them to a highly relevant…

In this article, Ajay Chaudry and Heather Sandstrom review research on child care and early education for children under age three. They describe the array of early care and education arrangements families use for infants and toddlers; how these patterns have changed in recent decades; and differences by family socioeconomic status, race, and…

In the past decades, income inequality has risen in most developed countries. There is growing interest among economists in international comparisons of economic and educational mobility. This is aided by the availability of internationally comparable, large-scale data. The present paper aims to make three contributions. First, we introduce the…

The validity of family background variables instrumenting education in income regressions has been much criticized. In this paper, we use data from the 2004 German Socio-Economic Panel and Bayesian analysis to analyze to what degree violations of the strict validity assumption affect the estimation results. We show that, in case of moderate direct…

In a recent paper, Reardon found that the relationship between family income and children's academic achievement grew substantially stronger in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States. We provide an international context for these results by examining the income-achievement association in 19 other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and…