research

Overtreatment at childbirth is a pressing topic worldwide. This paper provides novel evidence on the causal effect of non-medically indicated labor induction on the health of mothers and newborns, as well as on hospitals’ follow-up care. The analysis draws on the universe of hospital births in Germany from 2015–2016, a context where the timing of births helps reduce uncertainty in maternity unit management. By 2022, one in five women was induced—twice as often as in 1985. Identification leverages two quasi-random variations in the likelihood of induction for healthy first-time mothers: (1) the timing of natural prelabor membrane ruptures, and (2) the presence of recently completed deliveries upon hospital admission. Results show that induction increases perineal damage, follow-up surgery, and impairs neonatal fitness, while hospitals’ care responses understate these impacts relative to cesarean sections. Policies should target induction to prevent cascades of further interventions.

This project aims to combine Israeli hospital data on the universe of births from 2017 onwards with records of compulsory early-childhood examinations performed by medical officers. The idea is to use my identification strategy based on relative hospital arrival times to assess the impact of physician-induced birth interventions on maternal depression, breast feeding, and spacing to subsequent births.

We examine whether prenatal exposure to heat affects children’s later educational outcomes by linking 20 years of administrative school data from a German grammar school to meteorological records. For causal identification we exploit quasi-random variation in heat warnings at the county level during gestation conditioning on birthyear-by-month, birthcounty, and individual background. We find that exposure to any official heat warning in-utero reduces subsequent math performance by 0.36 standard deviations. The negative effect persists throughout secondary schooling, is stronger for males, increases in heat intensity, and remains robust across alternate specifications. Our findings highlight the persistent educational costs of early-life exposure to environmental heat and underscore the need for protective policies well before school entry.

This paper deals with denominational schools, important providers of education in many countries around the world. Due to their focus, these schools often operate with multigrade classes, in which more than one age cohort is taught in one classroom. Multigrade classes are a cost-effective way to provide education and play a crucial role in education policy in the context of demographic change. We estimate the causal effect of attending denominational schools with multigrade classes on schooling and short-run labor market outcomes. The analysis combines administrative records of schools with comprehensive population census data, and exploits the abolition of Catholic or Protestant schools in the Saarland, a German state, in 1969, for identification of the effect. The findings document significantly detrimental effects on final grade attainment and labor market participation. Notably, the negative impact is most pronounced in the outcomes of girls.

This paper turns to intentional modern multigrade settings created for pedagogical opporturnity. While teaching more than one age cohort of pupils in one classroom has been advocated as a cost-effective way to provide education and a means of fostering academic achievements through intensified interactions, the evidence on the effects of multigrade classes on performance is mixed. We provide novel evidence on the causal effect of multigrade teaching in primary schools on literacy skills by the end of primary school. The analysis is based on student test score data of more than 68’000 fourth-graders and exploits the staggered introduction of policies targeted at making entry to primary schools more flexible across German states between 2001 and 2016 for identification. The results from a difference-in-differences design document that attending multigrade classes had negative effects on reading test scores and German grades. These negative effects are more pronounced for girls.

In this paper I use the universe of students of a high school in Germany over the period 2002-2022, to investigate the effect of relative age on various schooling outcomes. OLS regressions reveal that children that are relatively younger than their class mates perform better, even when conditioning on age (in days, which is unobserved in related work). In contrast, an instrumental variables regression using birth dates relative to a series of changes in legal thresholds for first school enrolment as instrument for relative age in class reveals the opposite: younger children perform worse. This indicates that selection in first school enrollment plays an important role for school outcomes, suggesting that knowledge on the part of parents leads to young children entering school more likely when they are sufficiently mature so that their performance is high, whereas a mechanistic enrollment would likely harm other kids that benefit from being enrolled one year later.

Adressing political concerns about rigidities and path dependence in the German education system, we study the long-run effects of multigrade teaching in the form of flexible school entrance (FLEX) on the academic performance of high-ability students. Using administrative data on all public primary schools in Bielefeld from 1994–2024, linked to 20 years of high-school records with over 25,000 grades, we exploit exogenous variation in FLEX exposure across North-Rhine Westphalian municipalities and birth cohorts. Identification combines a novel instrument—FLEX availability by birth municipality and regular enrollment year—with a fixed-effects design that leverages the staggered municipal rollout, and controls for absolute age in days. The estimates show that early exposure to multigrade classrooms yields persistent gains in high-school achievement, raising grades across mathematics, German, and English. These results provide causal evidence that flexible school entrance generates sizable and lasting benefits for high-ability students.

This paper inspects the effects of the Colombian peace agreement of 2016 between the National Government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) on several violent outcomes. The methodology relies on estimating a set of event study designs considering the treatment group as the Zones Most Affected by the Armed Conflict (ZOMAC) using municipality data between 2012 and 2019. The primary findings are that the peace agreement reduced violent outcomes such as kidnappings, subversive actions, and attacks on police facilities while extortion cases increased. Our findings are stable across samples selected %through the likelihood to be part of the treatment group under a propensity score matching approach or alternative specifications employing a triple differences design.