This paper adds to the literature on extracurricular early childhood education and child development by exploiting unique data on an educational project in Germany, the Junior University (JU). Utilizing a quasi-experimental study design, we estimate the causal short-run effect of JU enrollment...

In this paper, we examine the heterogeneous treatment effects of a universal child care (preschool) program in Germany by exploiting the exogenous variation in attendance caused by a reform that led to a large staggered expansion across municipalities. Drawing on novel administrative data from...

Education yields substantial non-monetary benefits, but the size of these gains is still debated. Previous studies, for example, report contradictory effects of education and compulsory schooling on mortality - ranging from zero to large mortality reductions. Using data from 19 compulsory...

We exploit a recent state-level reform in Germany that granted parents the right to decide on the highest secondary school track suitable for their child, changing the purpose of the primary teacher's recommendation from mandatory to informational. Applying a disaggregated synthetic control...

Many countries are currently expanding access to child care for young children. But are all children equally likely to benefit from such expansions? We address this question by adopting a marginal treatment effects framework. We study the West German setting where high quality center-based care...

We investigate the effect of education Conditional Cash Transfer programs (CCTs) on teenage pregnancy. Our main concern is with how the size and sign of the effect may depend on the design of the program. Using a simple model we show that an education CCT that conditions renewal on school...

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...

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...

This paper studies the impact of a desegregation ruling on several medium-run outcomes. This ruling mandates that seven school districts, which serve higher-income, predominantly-white families, accept a group of minority elementary school students who apply to transfer from a nearby,...

We estimate the impact of a large curriculum reform in Switzerland that substantially increased the share of foreign language classes in compulsory school on students' subsequent educational choices in upper secondary school. Using administrative student register data and exploiting the...