Spillover Effects of Maternal Education on Child's Health and Schooling

This is the first study investigating the causal effect of maternal education on child's health and schooling outcomes in Germany. We apply an instrumental variables approach that has not yet been used in the intergenerational context. For that purpose, we draw on a rich German panel data set (SOEP) containing information about three generations. This allows instrumenting maternal education by the number of her siblings while conditioning on a set of variables describing the grandparents' social status and the area where the mother grew up. Given these variables, the number of siblings generates exogenous variation in the years of education by affecting the household resources available per child. We present evidence for strong and significant effects on schooling outcomes for both sexes. And, we find substantial effects on health behaviour for adolescent daughters, but not for adolescent sons. We show that possible concerns for the validity of the instrument are unlikely to compromise these results. We also discuss assortative mating and household income as possible channels of causality.Intergenerational mobility, returns to education, health, instrumental variables

Spillover Effects of Maternal Education on Child's Health and Health Behavior

This study investigates the effects of maternal education on child's health and health behavior. We draw on a rich German panel data set containing information about three generations. This allows instrumenting maternal education by the number of her siblings while conditioning on grandparental characteristics. The instrumental variables approach has not yet been used in the intergenerational context and works for the sample sizes of common household panels. We find substantial effects on health behavior for adolescent daughters, but neither for adolescent sons nor for the health status of newborns. We show that possible concerns for the validity of the instrument are unlikely to compromise these results. We discuss mother's health behavior, assortative mating, household income, and child¿s schooling track as possible channels of the estimated effects. Maternal education seems to affect daughter's smoking behavior through the higher likelihood of the daughter pursuing a higher secondary schooling track.The final publication is available at www.springerlink.com: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11150-012-9161-

Bildung der Mütter kommt der Gesundheit ihrer Kinder zugute

Jugendliche rauchen häufiger, treiben seltener Sport und sind öfter übergewichtig, je niedriger der Schulabschluss ihrer Mutter ist. Das zeigt eine Studie des DIW Berlin auf Grundlage von Daten des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP). Zumindest ein Teil dieser gesundheitsbezogenen Unterschiede kann ursächlich auf die Bildung der Mütter zurückgeführt werden. Soziale Unterschiede zeigen sich bereits bei der Gesundheit von Neugeborenen: Mütter mit höherer Bildung bringen seltener Frühgeburten und Kinder mit niedrigem Geburtsgewicht zur Welt. Eine gesundheitliche Ungleichheit besteht demnach von Geburt an. Mehr noch: Die daraus resultierende soziale Ungleichheit wird sozusagen vererbt.Young people tend to smoke more, do less sport, and are more frequently overweight, the lower their mother's school-leaving qualifications. This has been shown by a study conducted by DIW Berlin using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). At least some of these health-related differences can be causally attributed to the mother's education. Social differences are already reflected in the health of newborn babies: mothers with a higher level of education are less likely to have preterm births or to give birth to babies with low weight. In other words, there are health inequalities from birth and, moreover, the resultant social inequality is also inherited

Inverting Ray-Knight identity

We provide a short proof of the Ray-Knight second generalized Theorem, using a martingale which can be seen (on the positive quadrant) as the Radon-Nikodym derivative of the reversed vertex-reinforced jump process measure with respect to the Markov jump process with the same conductances. Next we show that a variant of this process provides an inversion of that Ray-Knight identity. We give a similar result for the Ray-Knight first generalized Theorem.Comment: 18 page

Spiraling and Folding: The Topological View

For every $n$, we construct two curves in the plane that intersect at least $n$ times and do not form spirals. The construction is in three stages: we first exhibit closed curves on the torus that do not form double spirals, then arcs on the torus that do not form spirals, and finally pairs of planar arcs that do not form spirals. These curves provide a counterexample to a proof of Pach and T\'{o}th concerning string graphs.Comment: 23 pages, 18 figure

Loss Bounds and Time Complexity for Speed Priors

Abstract This paper establishes for the first time the predictive performance of speed priors and their computational complexity. A speed prior is essentially a probability distribution that puts low probability on strings that are not efficiently computable. We propose a variant to the original speed prio

Monitoring climatic impacts on the moisture uptake of the first Swiss wildlife bridge made of wood

Wildlife bridges represent a major component of any sustainable strategy to counteract the negative consequences of cutting the natural habitat of wildlife into disconnected parts by motorways and rail. This is especially true for a small and densely populated country such as Switzerland with diverse wildlife scattered through its territory. Up to now all wildlife bridges in Switzerland have been made of concrete with steel reinforcement. The wildlife bridge under investigation here is the first one in Switzerland made of wood-based materials. The idea of building a wildlife bridge by using wood-based materials represents besides a challenging technological endeavor also an ecological progress regarding embodied energy. A further advantage which resulted after realizing the construction, was the short interruption time it needed for installation on a motorway in operation. The most urgent question with respect to the wood-based elements is their moisture uptake when subjected to weather conditions. The present paper reports on a long-term monitoring of this wooden wildlife bridge over a period of approximately 2 years. Different kind of sensors, data from a nearby meteorological station, data regarding hourly number of different kind of vehicles passing beneath the wildlife bridge as well as lab measurements have been used to enable a robust and reliable statement on wooden wildlife bridges subjected to Swiss flatland weather conditions

Meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies from the CHARGE consortium identifies common variants associated with carotid intima media thickness and plaque

Carotid intima media thickness (cIMT) and plaque determined by ultrasonography are established measures of subclinical atherosclerosis that each predicts future cardiovascular disease events. We conducted a meta-analysis of genome-wide association data in 31,211 participants of European ancestry from nine large studies in the setting of the Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology (CHARGE) Consortium. We then sought additional evidence to support our findings among 11,273 individuals using data from seven additional studies. In the combined meta-analysis, we identified three genomic regions associated with common carotid intima media thickness and two different regions associated with the presence of carotid plaque (P < 5 × 10 -8). The associated SNPs mapped in or near genes related to cellular signaling, lipid metabolism and blood pressure homeostasis, and two of the regions were associated with coronary artery disease (P < 0.006) in the Coronary Artery Disease Genome-Wide Replication and Meta-Analysis (CARDIoGRAM) consortium. Our findings may provide new insight into pathways leading to subclinical atherosclerosis and subsequent cardiovascular events