Project number: FK138015
Economic development and technological change have brought unprecedented challenges to societies. We believe that our results would contribute to developing public policy tools and interventions that could tackle these challenges. The findings of the first task would help the planning of educational interventions to prevent dropping out from secondary school. This
task uniquely identifies when mental health problems would emerge in secondary school and thus improves the scheduling of preventive interventions.
The second and third tasks focus on young people who are the first in their family to go to university. We are the first to look at this large and growing group in Hungary or any Central-Eastern-European country using quantitative methods and examine how intergenerational educational mobility affects completed fertility and childlessness. Confirming that first in family graduates are less likely to have children than continuing-generation graduates would help design policy interventions to support prospective
parents. Public policy interventions have always been in place to compensate the effects of economic shocks; however, they concentrated on short-term support and did not necessarily take into account the negative effects of shocks on the probability of childbearing. The findings of our forth tasks could contribute to the development of anti-cyclical interventions that target potential mothers in troubled times. From a scientific point of view, it is unique that we are able to estimate the effects of the financial crisis on the probability of abortions and miscarriages due to detailed Hungarian fertility data.
Lastly, our fifth task would uncover how adulthood generalized social trust is formed in childhood. Its results would create a possibility to design interventions that develop non-cognitive skills in childhood in order to build human and social capital.
