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...

Policy debates about the balance of vocational and general education programs focus on the school-to-work transition. But with rapid technological change, gains in youth employment from vocational education may be offset by less adaptability and thus diminished employment later in life. To test...

Between 1972 and 1978 U.S. high schools rapidly increased their female athletic participation rates - to approximately the same level as their male athletic participation rates - in order to comply with Title IX, a policy change that provides a unique quasi-experiment in female athletic...

As the time of leaving school determines the level of academic achievement this timing decision is central for the human capital investment decision. Real option theory offers a new perspective of the human capital investment decision under uncertainty and irreversibility. Unlike other...

When information about the true abilities of job-seekers and applicants are hard to get, statistical discrimination by employers can be an efficient strategy in the hiring and wage setting process. But statistical discrimination can induce costs, if labor relations cannot be terminated in the...

It has been argued that vocational education facilitates the school-to-work transition but reduces later adaptability to changing environments. Using the recent international PIAAC data, we confirm such a trade-off over the life-cycle in a difference-in-differences model that compares employment...

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 theory, the publication of performance ratings may improve performance through reputation concerns and peer effects or impede performance by demoralizing employees. This paper uses school-district data and a regression discontinuity design to answer how consumers and employees respond to...

We propose a signaling model of student enrollment dynamics based on probabilities of completion of studies, under different rationality assumptions. There are two types of students and two schools. School of graduation serves as a signal of student productivity to prospective employers. The...

The US experienced two dramatic changes in the structure of education in a fifty year period. The first was a large expansion of educational attainment; the second, an increase in test score gaps between college bound and non-college bound students. We study the impact of these two trends on the...