This volume was prepared by Susanne Link during her stay at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich and the Department of Human Capital and Innovation of the Ifo Institute of Economic Research. It was accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Economics Departure of the University of Munich in...

Im Land Mecklenburg-Vorpommern finden sich zwei staatliche (Voll-)Universitäten, drei staatliche Fachhochschulen und eine staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Theater. Im Vergleich zu den Einnahmen des Landes steigen die Finanzmittel der Hochschulen überproportional. Im Rahmen des...

Incentives are widely used to increase people’s effort and thus performance. Whileacademic achievement depends heavily on effort, there is little empirical evidence onhow students respond to incentives other than grades and monetary rewards. We drawon two natural experiments that occurred at a...

This paper evaluates a school reform in Bavaria that moved the timing of tracking in low- and middle-track schools from grade 6 to grade 4; students in high-track schools were not affected. To eliminate state specific and school-type-specific shocks, I estimate a triple-differences model using...

To obtain reliable estimates of the effects of single-sex education, I exploit the random assignment of students to single-sex and coeducational schools in South Korea. The results suggest that single-sex schooling is beneficial for girls in math, but has no effects for boys. Moreover,...

Gutachten im Auftrag der Sächsischen Staatskanzlei. <br>Bildung ist eine der zentralen föderalen Aufgaben in Deutschland. So können die Bundesländer die Bildungspolitik weitgehend alleine gestalten, müssen allerdings auch die Ausgaben dafür tragen. Die Bildungsausgaben stellen einen der...

Attendance of pre-primary institutions is positively associated with PISA test scores inmost countries. Several indicators of structural quality of pre-primary education areidentified that can account for the variation in the estimated coefficients on pre-primaryattendance across countries,...

This study was prepared by Martin Schlotter while he was working with the Ifo Institute for Economic Research. It was completed in June 2011 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Econcomics at the University of Munich in November 2011. It addresses the effects of different early...

Theoretical work shows that grading on a curve, i.e., teachers assessing students relativeto their classmates, can negatively affect students’ learning effort. However, little isknown about its empirical incidence. To overcome bias from non-random sorting andomitted variables like teachers’...

This volume was prepared by Marc Piopiunik while he has been working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in June 2011 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes four self-contained empirical studies. All studies aim at...