Outline This thesis comprises the following related, yet independent, chapters. Chapter 2uses data from the 1970 British Cohort study. It investigates the relationship between ten-years-olds’ skills and their life satisfaction measured in adulthood. The chapter enhances the understanding of this relationship by inspecting how it evolves over adulthood, and in which specific life domains the relationship is mostly present. Furthermore, the chapter explores how income and daily functioning mediate these relationships. Chapter 3 uses Dutch cohort data to analyze how skills develop from first to sixth grade. It focuses on the relationship between first-grade skill scores and their sixth-grade counterpart. The chapter examines achievement gaps regarding parental education, sex, and migration background, and inspects whether and the extent to which the roots of achievement differences at the end of primary school lay in the beginning of primary education. Chapter 4 uses Dutch panel data with students’ reading, spelling, and math proficiencies throughout primary education. It employs a panel vector autoregression approach to examine whether skills interact with each other. The chapter shows a simulation of the responses of a student’s skill set to a hypothetical shock in one skill. The resulting patterns provide descriptive insights into how skills vary and co-move. Chapter 5 exploits exogenous variation in temperature exposure of 11
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