This paper presents estimates of endogenous peer effects in pupils’ school achievement using data on national test scores, across multiple subjects and cohorts, for the population of primary school pupils in Years 3 and 5 (aged 7/8 and 9/10 years) in the Australian state of Victoria. Identification is achieved via school-grade fixed effects and instrumental variables (IV), exploiting plausibly random differences in the age distribution of peers and their gender mix across cohorts. The results provide strong evidence for the existence of endogenous peer effects across all subjects, with the IV estimates close in magnitude to the corresponding fixed-effects estimates, although less precisely estimated. In reading, for example, a one point increase in peers’ average test scores leads to between a .14 and .39 point increase in own test score, with similar ranges across other subjects.
This paper estimates the impact of fertility on mothers' labour supply in Australia, using exogenous variation in family size generated by twin births and the gender mix of siblings. Results show that having more than one child decreases labour market participation by 15.5 percentage points and hours worked by around 6 hours per week. Having more than two children reduces labour market participation by between 12 and 20 percentage points and hours worked by between 3 and 8 hours a week, depending on the instrument used. Interestingly, fathers also reduce both their labour market participation (by 10 percentage points) and their number of hours worked per week (by 4 hours) when having more than one child. Compared with the results obtained with the same methodology for other countries, the effects for Australia are large, which partly reflects the constraints on public childcare and the lack of a national paid parental leave scheme prior to 2011."--p. 2.
This paper studies the respective influence of intergenerational transmission and the environment in shaping individual trust. Focusing on second generation immigrants in Australia and the United States, we exploit the variation in the home and in the host country to separate the effect of the cultural background from that of the social and economic conditions on individual trust. Our results indicate that trust in the home country contributes to the trust of second generation immigrants in both host countries, but particularly so in the United States. Social and economic conditions in the host country, such as crime rate, economic inequality, race inequality and segregation by country of origin, also affect trust. Evidence for first generation immigrants confirms that the transmission of trust across generations is primarily important in the United States, and, that differences in trust levels between the two host countries increase with acculturation.
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