Parental beliefs about the returns to investment shape how parents invest in their children, yet their long-term consequences remain understudied. We examine how maternal locus of control, interpreted as a belief about the returns to investment, relates to children’s longterm development. Using a value-added model and nationally representative data, we find that maternal locus of control is strongly associated with socio-emotional development from early childhood through adolescence, while its relationship with cognitive skills is negligible and its association with educational outcomes is modest. Parental investment emerges as an important factor in the association between maternal locus of control and socio-emotional development.

The motherhood penalty drives gender inequality, yet its magnitude varies substantially across women. We exploit the random gender of firstborns in Finnish register data to study how parental preferences for family time shape this heterogeneity. A preference for daughters emerges, reflected in fertility and maternity leave outcomes. Ten years post-birth, university-educated mothers face a 10% larger penalty with a son, while less-educated mothers face a 5% larger penalty with a daughter. These differences reflect lower employment among less-educated women versus job sorting into family-friendly positions among university-educated women. Parental preferences, mediated by education-specific opportunities, shape the motherhood penalty heterogeneity.

Socio-emotional skills are key determinants of a wide range of early and later life outcomes, yet little is known about how classroom environments shape their development. Using nationally representative longitudinal data, this paper examines the impact of teacher gender on the socio-emotional skills of primary school students in England. Exploiting within-student variation across grades, we estimate student fixed effects models to identify causal effects of exposure to male versus female teachers. We find that having a male teacher improves boys’ prosocial behavior and increases girls’ peer problems. Further analysis supports the role-model hypothesis discussed in the literature for male students and reveals a novel mediating mechanism whereby parents of daughters adjust their investments in response to teacher-student gender mismatch.

Peer effects have been widely explored in the economics literature, yet no prior work has examined whether exposure to peers with different prior academic achievement influences a young person’s probability of being convicted for juvenile crime. We provide novel evidence on whether the likelihood of experiencing incarceration is affected by the academic achievement composition of secondary school peers by using linked administrative data on the full population of four cohorts of English students. To address pupils’ self-sorting into schools and the endogeneity of peer composition, we exploit quasi-random variation in cohort composition alongside predetermined measures of peer achievement measured at the end of primary school. We find that increasing the share of lower-achieving secondary school classmates by one percentage point raises the likelihood of custody by 0.021% of the outcome mean. The effects are stronger for pupils from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds and for those with lower prior attainment. We provide evidence on the mechanisms: exposure to lower-achieving peers affect behavioural outcomes such as unauthorized absences and school suspensions. Our findings offer important insights into how peer sorting can influence the risk of severe negative outcomes and contribute to reducing inequalities among young people.

Persistent gender inequalities in the labor market, including the motherhood penalty, are closely linked to the unequal division of childcare within families. Despite the increasing availability of paternity leave policiesworldwide, uptake remains low, with most fathers taking little or no leave. One potential explanation is that families perceive limited value in fathers spending time at home with their newborns. This paper investigates beliefs about the UK’s Shared Parental Leave (SPL) policy using a novel survey of a nationally representative sample of childbearing individuals. We find that individuals generally assign positive value to fathers taking leave, by reallocating a portion of the mother’s leave, across various outcomes related to the well-being of the mother, father, and child. A simple information intervention leads respondents to update their beliefs positively regarding the returns to paternal leave. However, belief updates only weakly affect policy support, charitable giving, and stated behavioral intentions. Responsiveness to the intervention is heterogeneous: parents, women, and individuals with more egalitarian gender norms show larger belief updates and greater changes in actual and hypothetical behavioral outcomes.

While economic research documents substantial negative effects of social media on youth outcomes, the role of parents in mediating these effects remains largely unexplored. We consider digital parenting as a new form of human capital investment and test whether interventions can shift parents' beliefs and practices, as well as children's outcomes. Drawing on a UK household longitudinal survey, Understanding Society, we first document that intensive social media use is associated with greater behavioural problems among children, and that parenting styles predict children's digital exposure. We then collect our own longitudinal survey with a representative sample of approximately 1,800 UK parents, and implement two randomized interventions: (i) an information treatment providing evidence on the risks of social media, and (ii) a four-week video parenting training on digital parenting strategies. The information treatment increased beliefs about returns to no-phone policies at schools on university enrollment by 47% of the control group mean and participation in follow-up training by 37\%, though it also raised parental anxiety by 20%. The parenting training generates suggestive evidence of improvements in parenting practices, particularly communication strategies. Effects on children's outcomes are modest but suggest reductions in screen time. These findings suggest that while providing information can effectively shift beliefs and, to some extent, practices, it involves welfare trade-offs.

This paper examines the relationship between subject specialization in high school and university undergraduate degree program choices. Focusing on a reform in England that encouraged students to opt for studying mathematics in the last 2 years of high school, the study analyzes its effect on undergraduate enrollment in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. The findings indicate that the reform increased the likelihood of students pursuing and completing STEM undergraduate degrees. Thus, encouraging mathematics specialization during high school enhances the number of STEM graduates. However, despite the reform’s implementation, gender and socioeconomic disparities in STEM participation remained unchanged, suggesting that interventions during adolescence might not effectively address the underrepresentation of specific groups, such as females, in STEM programs. 

This paper offers new evidence of the role of immigration in shaping the educational and labour market outcomes of natives. We use administrative data on the entire English higher education system and exploit the idiosyncratic variation of foreign students within university-degree across four cohorts of undergraduate students. Foreign peers have zero to mild effects on natives’ educational outcomes, such as graduation probability and degree classification. Significant effects are found on displacement across universities and degree types after enrolment, although these outcomes are rare occurrences. In line with the mild effects on education outcomes, we also find little evidence of foreign peers affecting early labour market outcomes of native graduates. 

Early development of non-cognitive skills has long-lasting benefits for children's subsequent educational attainment and wages. Drawing on a rich, nationally representative longitudinal sample of young children in Ireland, we present new evidence on whether the use of centre-based childcare (CBC) in infancy and early years promotes non-cognitive skills by school entry. We focus on the type of non-parental childcare used by mothers who are working when their child is 9 months old, comparing CBC with other forms of non-parental care. We consider the impact of childcare type on three domains of socio-emotional skills: externalizing, internalizing and prosocial behaviours. We find negative effects of CBC on both externalizing and prosocial behaviours. With a cumulative value-added model, we estimate that CBC at age 3 worsens externalizing behaviour at age 5 by 0.11 standard deviations compared to other forms of non-parental care, equivalent to 44% of the difference in externalizing behaviour between children with a mother with/without tertiary education. The effect of CBC on the externalizing dimension of socio-emotional skills of children entering school is consistent across several specifications and robustness checks. Given planned expansion of CBC for those needing subsidized provision, we conclude that such measures could exacerbate socio-emotional inequalities. 

This article uses variation in unemployment caused by the 2008 UK recession to analyse socio-economic gaps in graduate outcomes. Our data come from a survey that collects information on several cohorts of students from all English universities and reports their destinations at 6 months after graduation. The results show that, when graduating in a recession, students from less advantaged family backgrounds are more likely to become unemployed, to work part-time, and to earn less than students from more advantaged families. There is evidence that professional networks established while at university are important in explaining some of these socio-economic gaps in outcomes.

This paper shows that students are less likely to specialize in mathematics when exposed to a high share of male peers. I exploit a curricular reform that incentivized students to obtain a mathematics qualification post-16. I show that, for those students affected by the reform, the higher the share of same-gender classmates, the higher the likelihood of obtaining a mathematics qualification for boys, and the lower the likelihood for girls. I interpret this as suggestive evidence that one’s perceived ability in mathematics, a boy-dominated subject, decreases when the share of male classmates increases. This further affects STEM participation in higher education.