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 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…

In 19 (sub)samples from seven countries (United States, Austria, Germany, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Vietnam, Brazil), we analyzed the impact of parental education compared with wealth on the cognitive ability of children (aged 4-22 years, total N = 15,297). The background of their families ranged from poor indigenous remote villagers to academic…

When Canadian parents look back on their own lives and the lives of their parents, they see changes across a generation that have profoundly affected their parenting experience, compared to when they themselves were young children. Supports for today's parents must take into consideration these changes that affect the care and nurturing of…