The gap in university enrollment by parental education is large and persistent in many countries. In our representative survey, 74 percent of German university graduates, but only 36 percent of those without a university degree favor a university education for their children. The latter are more...

This paper studies whether the introduction of tuition fees at public universities in some German states had a negative effect on enrollment, i.e., on the transition of high school graduates to public universities in Germany. In contrast to recent studies, we do not find a significant effect on...

Despite the widespread provision of retiree health insurance for public sector workers, little attention has been paid to its effects on employee retirement. This is in contrast to the large literature on health-insurance-induced “job-lock” in the private sector. I use the introduction of...

Recent analyses of intergenerational mobility show that investments in children pay big dividends. The priority of resources in early childhood also affects the working of the local economy. Geographic variation in child care services motivates location of families and thereby influences housing...

Improving public sector workforce quality is challenging in sectors such as education where worker productivity is difficult to assess and manager incentives are muted by political and bureaucratic constraints. In this paper, we study how providing information to principals about teacher...

We empirically analyze sub-national migration of graduates in Germany and its determinants. Based on a longitudinal, representative survey-based dataset of students who graduated in the academic year 2004/2005, we observe the transition to the labor market and previous and subsequent migration...

How do alternative job opportunities affect teacher quality? We provide the first causal evidence on this question by exploiting business cycle conditions at career start as a source of exogenous variation in the outside options of potential teachers. Unlike prior research, we directly assess...

In this paper we argue that different preferences in a decentralized system lead to under provision of public goods. We analyze the provision of public primary education in nineteenth-century Prussia which was characterized by a linguistically polarized society and a decentralized education...

We investigate whether the decision to experiment with novel policies is influenced by electoral incentives. Our empirical setting is the U.S. welfare reform in 1996, which marked the most dramatic shift in social policy since the New Deal. We find that electoral incentives matter: governors...

Early retirement incentives (ERIs) are increasingly prevalent in education as districts seek to close budget gaps by replacing expensive experienced teachers with lower-cost newer teachers. Combined with the aging of the teacher workforce, these ERIs are likely to change the composition of...