Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E S Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der ArbeitInstitute for the Study ABSTRACTThe Effect of Extra Funding for Disadvantaged Pupils on Achievement * This paper evaluates the effects of two subsidies targeted at disadvantaged pupils in the Netherlands. The first scheme gives primary schools with at least 70 percent minority pupils extra funding for personnel. The second scheme gives primary schools with at least 70 percent pupils from different disadvantaged groups extra funding for computers and software. The cutoffs at 70 percent provide a regression discontinuity design which we exploit in a local difference-in-differences framework. For both subsidies we find negative point estimates. For the personnel subsidy these are in most cases not significantly different from zero. For the computer subsidy we find more evidence of negative effects. We discuss several explanations for these counterintuitive results.

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The prevalence of overweight and obesity is growing rapidly in many countries. Education policies might be important for reducing this increase. This paper analyses the causal effect of education on the probability of being overweight by using longitudinal data of Australian identical twins. The data include self-reported and clinical measures of body size. Our cross-sectional estimates confirm the well-known negative association between education and the probability of being overweight. For men we find that education also reduces the probability of being overweight within pairs of identical twins. The estimated effect of education on overweight status increases with age. Remarkably, for women we find no negative effect of education on body size when fixed family effects are taken into account. Identical twin sisters who differ in educational attainment do not systematically differ in body size. Peer effects within pairs of identical twin sisters might play a role.

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This paper investigates whether studying abroad increases the propensity to live abroad later on. We use an instrumental variable approach based on cut-offs in the ranking of Dutch higher education graduates who applied for a specific scholarship program. Applicants with a ranking above the cut-off received a scholarship from the program to study abroad, whereas students with a ranking below the cut-off were not awarded a scholarship from the program. We find that assignment of a scholarship from the program increases the probability to study abroad and the number of months spent studying abroad. Moreover, studying abroad and the number of months spent studying abroad reduce the probability of currently living in the Netherlands.JEL Codes: I2, J24, J61

The genetic influence on the association between contemporaneously measured intelligence and academic achievement in childhood was examined in nationally representative cohorts from England and The Netherlands using a whole population indirect twin design, including singleton data. We identified 1,056 samesex and 495 opposite-sex twin pairs among 174,098 British 11 year-olds with test scores from 2004, and, 785 same-sex and 327 opposite-sex twin pairs among 120,995 Dutch schoolchildren, aged 8, 10 or 12 years, with assessments from 1994 to 2002.The estimate of intelligence heritability was large in both cohorts, consistent with previous studies (h^2 = .70 ±.14, England; h^2 = .43 ±.28 to .67 ±.31, The Netherlands), as was the heritability of academic achievement variables (h^2 = .51 ±.16 to .81 ±.16, England; h^2 = .36 ±.27 to .74 ±.27, The Netherlands). Additive genetic covariance explained the large majority of the phenotypic correlations between intelligence and academic achievement scores in England, when standardised to a bivariate heritability (Biv h^2 = .76 ±.15 to .88 ±.16), and less consistent but often large proportions of the phenotypic correlations in The Netherlands (Biv h^2 = .33 ±.52 to 1.00 ±.43). In the British cohort both nonverbal and verbal reasoning showed very high additive genetic covariance with achievement scores (Biv h^2 = .94 to .98; Biv h^2 = .77 to 1.00 respectively). In The Netherlands, covariance estimates were consistent across age groups. The heritability of intelligence-academic achievement associations in two population cohorts of elementary schoolchildren, using a twin pair extraction method, is at the high end of estimates reported by studies of largely preselected twin samples. This is the accepted manuscript of the following publication: Calvin CM, Deary IJ, Webbink D, Smith P, Fernandes C, Lee SH, Luciano M & Visscher PM (2012) Multivariate genetic analyses of cognition and academic achievement from two population samples of 174,000 and 166,000 school children. Behavior Genetics 42: 699-710. The final publication is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10519-012-9549-7 The authors declare no conflict of interest. TITLE AbstractThe genetic influence on the association between contemporaneously measured intelligence and academic achievement in childhood was examined in nationally representative cohorts from England and The Netherlands using a whole population indirect twin design, including singleton data. We identified 1,056 same-sex and 495 opposite-sex twin pairs among 174,098 British 11 year-olds with test scores from 2004, and, 785 same-sex and 327 opposite-sex twin pairs among 120,995 Dutch schoolchildren, aged 8, 10 or 12 years, with assessments from 1994 to 2002. The estimate of intelligence heritability was large in both cohorts, consistent with previous studies (h2 = .70 ±.14, England; h2 = .43 ±.28 to .67 ±.31, The Netherlands), as was the heritability of academic achievement variables (h2 = .51 ±.16 to .81 ±.16, England; h2 = .36 ±.27 to .74 ±.27, ...

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