This paper evaluates the long-run effects of economic instability. In particular, we study the impact of idiosyncratic shocks to father’s income on children’s human capital accumulation variables such as school drop-outs, repetition rates and domestic and non-domestic labor. Although, the problem of child labor in Brazil has declined greatly during the last decade, the number of children workin...

Infants experienced a female adult handling them toys. Sometimes, however, the transaction failed, either because the adult was in various ways unwilling to give the toy (e.g., she teased the child with it or played with it herself) or else because she was unable to give it (e.g., she accidentally dropped it). Infants at 9, 12, and 18 months of age reacted with more impatience (e.g., reaching, ...

Drawing on the self-system model, this study conceptualized school engagement as a multidimensional construct, including behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement, and examined whether changes in the three types of school engagement related to changes in problem behaviors from 7th through 11th grades (approximately ages 12-17). In addition, a transactional model of reciprocal relations be...

People tend to be overconfident when predicting their performance on a variety of physical and mental tasks (i.e., they predict they will perform better than they actually do). Such a pattern is commonly found in educational settings, in which many students greatly overestimate how well they will perform on exams. In particular, the lowest-performing students tend to show the greatest overconfi...

To identify potential counseling needs of grade-retained students, in-depth qualitative interviews with eight adolescent subjects focused on their (and a parent’s) psychosocial responses to being “left behind”. The participants universally reported highly negative developmental changes related to grade retention, including lower self-esteem, social isolation from peers, shame about being older ...

Low-achieving students in many school districts are retained in a grade in order to allow them to gain the academic or social skills that teachers believe are necessary to succeed academically. This practice is highly controversial, with many researchers claiming that it leads to higher dropout rates although selection issues have complicated previous analyses. In this paper, we use a regressio...