Does a high regional concentration of immigrants of the same ethnicity affect immigrant children's acquisition of host-country language skills and educational attainment? We exploit the exogenous placement of guest workers from five ethnicities across German regions during the 1960s and 1970s in...

Cross-country evidence on student achievement might be hampered by omitted country characteristics such as language or legal differences. This paper uses cross-state variation in Germany, whose sixteen states share the same language and legal system, but pursue different education policies. The...

Fragt man junge Erwachsene, ob sie in ihrer Jugend Sport getrieben haben, bejahen das unabhängig vom Bildungshintergrund der Eltern rund drei Viertel. Betrachtet man hingegen, wie viel Zeit Jugendliche mit sportlichen Aktivitäten verbringen, zeigen sich deutlich niedrigere Werte bei Befragten...

Berechnungen des IW Köln zeigen, dass es in Regionen mit vielen armutsgefährdeten Kindern auch häufiger zu Schulabbrüchen kommt. Die Armutsgefährdung geht dabei häufig mit geringerer Bildung der Eltern einher. Damit sich durch Vererbung von Bildungsarmut die Armutsgefährdung in...

Nineteenth-Century Catholic doctrine strongly opposed state schooling. We show that countries with larger shares of Catholics in 1900 (but without a Catholic state religion) tend to have larger shares of privately operated schools even today. We use this historical pattern as a natural...

Decentralization of decision making is among the most intriguing recent school reforms, in part because countries went in opposite directions over the past decade and because prior evidence is inconclusive. We suggest that autonomy may be conducive to student achievement in well-developed...

This paper uses extensive student-level micro databases of three international student achievement tests to estimate heterogeneity in the effect of external exit exams on student performance along three dimensions. First, quantile regressions show that the effect tends to increase with student...

We use the PISA student-level achievement database to estimate international education production functions. Student characteristics, family backgrounds, home inputs, resources, teachers and institutions are all significantly related to math, science and reading achievement. Our models account...