In this paper we investigate the effect of Head Start on long term education and labor market outcomes using data from the NLSY79. The contributions to the existing literature on the effectiveness of Head Start are threefold: (1) we are the first to examine distributional effects of Head Start...

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...

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...

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...

This study estimates the lifetime effects of lost instructional time in the classroom on labor market performance. For identification, I use historical shifts in the school year schedule in Germany, which substantially shortened the duration of the affected school years with no adjustments in...

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...

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...

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 paper analyzes the allocation of workers to jobs and the wage distribution in Germany. Our main contribution is to reconcile prominent empirical models of wage dispersion (Abowd et al., 1999; Card et al., 2013) with theoretical sorting models (Shimer and Smith, 2000; Eeckhout and Kircher, 2011;...