This paper analyzes the impact of shortening the duration of secondary schooling on the accumulation of human capital. In 2003, an educational policy reform was enacted in Saxony-Anhalt, a German state, providing a natural experimental setting. The thirteenth year of schooling was eliminated for...

Based on a structural model of fertility and female labour force supply with unobserved heterogeneity and state dependence, we evaluate the 2007 reform of parental leave benefits in Germany, which replaced a flat, means-tested benefit by a generous earnings-related transfer. The model predicts a...

We analyze the wage effects of employment breaks of women entering motherhood using a novel within-firm matching approach where mothers? wages upon return to the job are compared with those of their female colleagues within the same firm. Using an administrative German data set we investigate...

A number of contributions have found evidence for motherhood being a critical life event for women's employment careers. This study presents a detailed model for the du- ration of maternity leave in which young mothers can make a transition into a number of states related to employment and...

Der Beitrag vergleicht die Effizienz von zehn zentralen familienpolitischen Leistungen in Deutschland hinsichtlich der Ziele der wirtschaftlichen Stabilität und der Vereinbarkeit von Familie und Beruf. Die Wirkungsanalysen berücksichtigen die Interaktionen im Leistungssystem und mögliche...

Endogeneity in network formation hinders the identification of the role social networks play in generating spillovers, peer effects and other externalities. This paper tackles this problem and investigates how the link network between articles on the German Wikipedia influences the attention and...

Despite the interdependence between cognitive and noncognitive skills, empirical studies have shown a longer period of acquisition in life-time for the latter besides relevance for educational and labor market success. Analyzing returns of investments during different periods of life is...

I quantify spillovers of attention in a network of content pages, which is challenging, because such networks form endogenously. I exploit exogenous variation in the article network of German Wikipedia to circumvent this problem. Wikipedia prominently advertises one featured article on its main...

Diese Arbeit untersucht die erwerbsfÄahig eingestuften Bezieher von Arbeitslosengeld II, die mindestens einmal Arbeitslosengeld II im dritten Quartal 2006 bezogen haben. Unsere Ergebnisse zeigen, dass 16% der Bezieher von Arbeitslosengeld II im dritten Quartal 2006 während des Zeitraums 2000...

The purpose of this article is to evaluate the importance of social class, migration background and command of national languages for the PISA school performance of teenagers living in European countries (France, Finland, Germany, United Kingdom, and Sweden) and traditional countries of...