Kamila Cygan-Rehm (Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories) 27.10.2022

It is our pleasure to host Dr. Kamila Cygan-Rehm (Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories) who will present on Thursday October 27, 2022 at 12:45 in room RB437 about her research on the topic “School starting age and personality traits”.

BIO: Dr. Cygan-Rehm is the Head of the Research Group “Outcomes of Education Across the Lifespan“ at the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) in Bamberg. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), where I also spent several years as a post-doc in the team of Regina T. Riphahn. Her research interests are in applied microeconomics, mainly education and labor economics, family and population economics, and public health. Find out more about her current research here.

ABSTRACT: This paper investigates the long-run effects of school starting age (SSA) on personality traits. For identification, we exploit the statutory cutoff rules for school enrollment in Germany spanning a half-century. Specifically, we apply a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to panel data on individuals born between the late 1940s and the early 1990s, which allows us to study the impact of SSA at different stages in adulthood. We find that a higher SSA persistently reduces the levels of neuroticism among women. The effects on other personality traits, if anything, are transitory and coincide with important life events.