We characterize intergenerational mobility in Germany using census data on educational attainment and parental income for 526,000 children. Our measure of educational attainment is the A-Level degree, a requirement for access to university. A 10 percentile increase in the parental income rank is...

International student exchange has become an important part of university-level studiesand the EU plans to increase it significantly. Weanalyze how international student exchange affects students’ academic human capital. Usingdetailed student-level data fromfour faculties (Economics and...

Patience and risk-taking – two cultural traits that steer intertemporal decision-making – are fundamental to human capital investment decisions. To understand how they contribute to international differences in student achievement, we combine PISA tests with the Global Preference Survey. We...

Patience and risk-taking - two cultural traits that steer intertemporal decision-making - are fundamental to human capital investment decisions. To understand how they contribute to international differences in student achievement, we combine PISA tests with the Global Preference Survey. We find...

We investigate the achievement impact of alternative uses of student assessments. Our dataset covers over 2 million students in 59 countries observed over 6 waves in the international PISA test 2000-2015. Our empirical model exploits the country panel dimension to investigate assessment reforms...

International student exchange has become an important part of university-level studies and the EU plans to increase it significantly. We analyze how international student exchange affects students’ academic human capital. Using detailed student-level data from four faculties (Economics and...

It is known that small firms rely mainly on the CEO's individual knowledge for developing innovations. Recent work suggests that this approach is inefficient since it underutilizes other employees' knowledge. We study to which extent using CEOs, managers and non-managerial employees' ideas...

Established firms often face significant obstacles to innovation. As a solution, it has been suggested to form corporate ventures. Based on a sample of corporate and independent ventures in German manufacturing, we show that corporate ventures are more innovative than the control group, i.e. the...

German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly...

This paper investigates how competition and firm size affect the relationship between market uncertainty and Ramp;D investment. We use an intuitively appealing measure of firm-specific uncertainty along with panel data to show that firms invest less in current Ramp;D as uncertainty about market...