No abstract

Theory and empirical evidence suggest that parents allocate their investments unequally among their children, thus inducing within-family inequality. We investigate whether parents reinforce or compensate for initial ability differences between their children as well as whether these parental responses vary by family socioeconomic status (SES). Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (ECLS-B) and a twin fixed-effects approach to address unobserved heterogeneity, we find that parental responses to early ability differences between their children do vary by family SES. Contrary to prior findings, we find that advantaged parents provide more cognitive stimulation to higher-ability children, and lower-class parents do not respond to ability differences. No analogous stratification in parental responses to birth weight is found, suggesting that parents' responses vary across domains of child endowments. The reinforcing responses to early ability by high-SES parents do not, however, led to increases in ability differences among children because parental responses have little effect on children's later cognitive performance in this twin sample.

The majority of European, as well as many other, countries responded to the outbreak of the new coronavirus with a closure of schools and universities. The expectation of policy makers was that schools and universities would continue to provide lessons online and that students would engage in home learning. How much home learning has there been? We use nationally representative, longitudinal data on 14- to 25-year-old Swiss students to analyze the effects of school closures on studying time. Our results show that students reduced, on average, their studying time from 35 to 23 hours per week. This reduction was stronger for students in secondary school age than for students older than 18. Contrary to our expectations, these reductions in studying time did not vary between male and female students. In addition, children from families with highly educated parents reduced their studying time in absolute terms more than children from families with low educated parents. In relative terms, reductions in children’s studying time did not vary by parental education. We also found some variation in the reduction in studying time across the three linguistic regions in Switzerland. Taken together, our findings show that studying time was considerably reduced during the closure of schools. We therefore conclude by suggesting political measures that can compensate for the loss in studying time a generation of Swiss students experienced between March and July 2020.

Research on educational mobility is concerned with inequalities between families. Differences in innate abilities and parental responses lead, however, to educational differences between siblings. If parental responses vary by family socioeconomic background, within-family inequality can affect between-family inequality (i.e., educational mobility). This study uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) to test whether sibling similarity in education varies by family socioeconomic background. In addition, I test whether the effects of birth order, birth spacing, and maternal age on education vary by family background. Results show that sibling similarity in education is similar in low-and high-socioeconomic status families. The negative influences of a higher birth order and a younger maternal age on educational attainment, however, are concentrated in socioeconomically disadvantaged families. These findings suggest that socioeconomically advantaged families do not generally compensate for ability differences between their children but that they compensate for disadvantageous life events.