Student loans schemes are in operation in more than seventy countries around the world.Most loans schemes benefit from sizeable built-in government subsidies and, in addition, aresubject to repayment default and administrative costs that are not passed on to studentborrowers. We probe two issues...

We estimate the elasticity of enrollment into higher education with respect to the amount of means tested student aid (BAfoeG) provided by the federal government using the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP). Potential student aid is derived on the basis of a detailed tax-benefit microsimulation...

This paper uses a two-country model with integrated markets for high-skilled labor to analyzethe opportunities and incentives for national governments to provide higher education.Countries can differ in productivity, and education is financed through a wage tax, so thatbrain drain affects the...

We present a general model of child labor that incorporates the various componentspresented in the literature as explanations for its existence. Our proposal is to mitigate thephenomenon by encouraging temporary emigration...

This paper examines whether family and community migration experience affect theprobability of high school graduation in Mexico once unobserved heterogeneity is accountedfor. Bivariate random effects dynamic probit models for cluster data are estimated to controlfor the endogeneity of education...

While the allocative efficiency of mobility is typically considered to be positive but small in the long run, the induced changes in equality may be considerable in size. In practice, however, migrants typically improve their income position in comparison to those at home, stimulate the economic...

Based on a wage curve approach we examine the labor market effects of migration in Germany. The wage curve relies on the assumption that wages respond to a change in the unemployment rate, albeit imperfectly. This allows one to derive the wage and employment effects of migration simultaneously...

In this paper, we propose and test a novel effect of immigration on the wages of nativeworkers. Existing studies have focused on the wage effects that result from changes in theaggregate labour supply in a competitive labour market. We argue that if labour markets arenot fully competitive, the...

This paper provides unheard direct evidence that comparisons exert a significant effect onsubjective well-being. It also evaluates the relative importance of different types ofbenchmarks...

The request for a strengthening of academic research at the German economic researchinstitutes by the German Science Council more than a decade ago was founded on thecrucial insight that sound policy advice - the traditional task of the institutes - can only beguaranteed in the long term if it...