Lifelong learning is often promoted in ageing societies, but little is known about its returns or governments' ability to advance it. This paper evaluates the effects of a large-scale randomized field experiment issuing vouchers for adult education in Switzerland. We find no significant average...

Expanded international data from the PIAAC survey of adult skills allow us to analyze potential sources of the cross-country variation of comparably estimated labor-market returns to skills in a more diverse set of 32 countries. Returns to skills are systematically larger in countries that have...

This paper analyses the effects of education signals for Ethnic Germans and Germans without a migration background (Native Germansʺ). We base our analysis on a sorting model with productivity enhancing effects of education. We compare whether the signalling value differs between the migrants...

The consumption value of higher education is an important factor behind the individual's educational choice. We provide a comprehensive literature survey, and define the consumption value as the private, intended, non-pecuniary return to higher education. We provide new empirical evidence for...

The stylized facts suggest a negative relationship between tax progressivity and the skill premium from the early 1960s until the early 1990s, and a positive one thereafter. They also generally imply rising tax progressivity, except for the 1980s. In this paper, we ask whether optimal tax policy...

The central vs. local nature of high-school exit exam systems can have important repercussions on the labor market. By increasing the informational content of grades, central exams may improve the sorting of students by productivity. To test this, we exploit the unique German setting where...

Many countries use centralized exit exams as a governance devise of the school system. While abundant evidence suggests positive effects of central exams on achievement tests, previous research on university-bound students shows no effects on subsequent earnings. We suggest that labor-market...

This study replicates and challenges the finding of zero wage returns to compulsory schooling in Germany by Pischke and von Wachter (Review of Economics and Statistics, 90(3), 592-598), which is unusual in the literature yet widely cited and until now uncontradicted. I document that this finding...

This study replicates and challenges the finding of zero wage returns to compulsory schooling in Germany by Pischke and von Wachter (Review of Economics and Statistics, 90(3), 592-598), which is unusual in the literature yet widely cited and until now uncontradicted. I document that this finding...

This study estimates the effect of compulsory schooling on earnings. For identification, I exploit a German reform that extended the duration of secondary schooling in the 1960s. I find that hourly wages increase by 6%-8% per additional year of schooling. This result challenges prior findings...