Incentives to invest in higher education are affected by both the direct wage effect of human capital investments and the indirect wage effect resulting from lower unemployment risks and shorter spells in unemployment associated with higher educated. We analyse the returns to education in...

This paper evaluates the effects of a high school curriculum reform on students ́probability to enroll at university and to choose Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics (STEM) as college major. The reform that was introduced in one German state increased the degree of difficulty to...

We study the welfare effects of school district consolidation, i.e. the integration of disjoint school districts into a centralised clearinghouse. We show theoretically that, in the worst-case scenario, district consolidation may unambiguously reduce students' welfare, even if the...

Patience and risk-taking - two cultural traits that steer intertemporal decision-making - are fundamental to human capital investment decisions. To understand how they contribute to international differences in student achievement, we combine PISA tests with the Global Preference Survey. We find...

This article estimates the market value of public education by comparing standardized test scores of students in public and private schools. The idea is to assign to the education of each public school student a market value equivalent to the tuition paid by private school students with similar...

This paper investigates the impact of studying the first-choice university subject on dropout and switching field of study for a cohort of students in Germany. Using detailed survey data, and employing an instrumental variable strategy based on variation in the local field of study availability,...

Decisions to invest in human capital depend on people’s time preferences. We show that differences in patience are closely related to substantial subnational differences in educational achievement, leading to new perspectives on longstanding within-country disparities. We use social-media data...