The publication of the OECD report on the PISA 2000 study induced a public outcry in Germany. On average, German students participating in this standardized test performed considerably below the OECD average and substantially worse than those of other European countries, like Finland or Ireland....

The German practice of compelling weak students to repeat a class has come under heavy criticism recently. Many observers fear that this practice is, at best, useless or even counterproductive. However, little is known so far on the consequences of having to repeat a class, as compared to be...

Determining the optimal age at which a child should enter school is a controversial topic in education policy. In particular, German policy makers, pedagogues, parents, and teachers have since long discussed whether the traditional, established age of school entry at 6 years remains appropriate....

Assessing the migration potential and predicting future migration streams are among the most relevant, yet least well understood topics of migration research. The usual approach taken to address aggregate-level prediction problems is to fit ad hoc specifications to historical data, and to...

Each year Germany and many other developed economies spend tens of billions of Euros on active measures of employment promotion with the explicit aim of contributing to the reduction of unemployment. Yet, high unemployment has universally been a persistent problem throughout the last two...

Heterogeneity in the ethnic composition of Germany's immigrant population renders general conclusions on the degree of economic integration difficult. Using a rich longitudinal data-set, this paper tests for differences in economic assimilation profiles of four groups of foreign-born immigrants...

Recent literature on multinational firms has stressed the importance of low productivity as a barrier to the cross-border expansion of firms. But firms may also need external finance to shoulder the costs of entering foreign markets. We develop a model of multinational firms facing real and...

Does more FDI make the world a riskier place for workers? We analyze whether an increase in multinational firms' activities is associated with an increase in firm-level employment volatility. We use a firm-level dataset for Germany which allows us to distinguish between purely domestic firms,...