One of the most important policy goals in industrialized countries is to increase the skill level of the labor force by life-long-learning strategies. In this paper our aim is to explain to what extent the variation in training investments is determined either by (observed and unobserved)...

Over the 2000s, many federal states in Germany shortened the duration of secondary school by one year while keeping the curriculum unchanged. Exploiting quasi-experimental variation due to the staggered introduction of this reform allows me to identify the causal effect of increased learning...

Prior to the introduction of mother tongue based education in 1994, the language of instruction for most subjects in Ethiopia's primary schools was the official language (Amharic) - the mother tongue of only one third of the population. This paper uses the variation in individual's exposure to...

This paper studies heterogeneity in schooling decisions by socio-economic status (SES) in response to a repeal of achievement-based admissions requirements (i.e. binding track recommendations) in Germany's between-school tracking system. The main contribution is to show that while previously...

Studies on the underlying mechanisms of social mobility commonly find that half of the intergenerational earnings persistence remains unexplained. Focusing on the phenomenon of overqualification, this study examines a transmission channel that might operate beyond the mechanisms previously...

Bezahlte Nachhilfe ist inzwischen für viele Kinder und Jugendliche ein wichtiges zusätzliches Lernangebot. In der Sekundarstufe I nutzten im Jahr 2013 insgesamt 18 Prozent aller Schülerinnen und Schüler bezahlte Nachhilfeangebote, in der Grundschule waren es sechs Prozent. Im Zeitraum von...

AbiturientInnen, deren Eltern keinen Hochschulabschluss haben, studieren seltener als MitschülerInnen, bei denen mindestens ein Elternteil einen Universitäts- oder Fachhochschulabschluss hat. Erste Ergebnisse des Berliner-Studienberechtigten-Panels (Best Up) des DIW Berlin und des...

Auch wenn in den vergangenen Jahren die Anzahl der Studierenden im ersten Semester immer mehr angestiegen ist, bleiben sozioökonomische Unterschiede ein Thema beim Übergang in die Hochschule: Studienberechtigte, deren Eltern kein Studium abgeschlossen haben, beginnen seltener ein Studium als...

Although the proportion of students enrolled in college increased in the last decades, students from non-college family backgrounds remain underrepresented in higher education around the world. This study sheds light on whether the provision of information in a randomized controlled trial with...