This article investigates whether schooling outcomes at age 15 are affected by the duration of maternity leave, i.e. the time mothers spend at home with their new‐born before returning to work. We exploit an unanticipated reform in Austria which extended the maximum duration of paid and job protected parental leave from 12 to 24 months for births as of 1 July, 1990. Using PISA data from the cohorts 1990 and 1987, we find no significant overall impact of the parental leave extension on standardised test scores. However, subgroup analyses reveal strong heterogeneity by maternal education and child gender.

This paper assesses the long-run toll taken by a large-scale technological disaster on welfare, well-being and mental health. We estimate the causal effect of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe after 20 years by linking geographic variation in radioactive fallout to respondents of a nationally representative survey in Ukraine according to their place of residence in 1986. The psychological effects of this nuclear disaster are large and persistent. More affected individuals exhibit poorer subjective well-being, higher depression rates and lower subjective survival probabilities; they rely more on governmental transfers as source of subsistence. We estimate the aggregate annual welfare loss at 6-8% of Ukraine's GDP highlighting previously ignored externalities of large-scale catastrophes.

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This series presents research findings based either directly on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) or using SOEP data as part of an internationally comparable data set (e.g. CNEF, ECHP, LIS, LWS, CHER/PACO). SOEP is a truly multidisciplinary household panel study covering a wide range of social and behavioral sciences: