To increase employee participation in training activities, the German government introduced a large-scale training voucher program in 2008 that reduces training fees by half. Based on a randomized field experiment, this paper analyzes whether providing information about the existence and the...

Higher education finance depends on the public’s preferences for charging tuition, which may be partly based on beliefs about the university earnings premium. To test whether public support for tuition depends on earnings information, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of...

We show that the electorate’s preferences for using tuition to finance higher education strongly depend on the design of the payment scheme. In representative surveys of the German electorate (N18,000), experimentally replacing regular upfront by deferred income-contingent payments increases...

Public preferences for charging tuition are important for determining higher education finance. To test whether public support for tuition depends on information and design, we devise several survey experiments in representative samples of the German electorate (N19,500). The electorate is...

Economic research suggests that investments in early education are generally more successful than investments at later ages. This paper presents a representative survey experiment on education spending in Germany, which exhibits low relative public spending on early education. Results are...

We discuss the impacts of the Russian invasion on Ukrainian science. Using newly collected data, we show that the war has already had significant effects on science in Ukraine: research papers produced by Ukrainian scientists declined by about 10%, approximately 5% of the most prolific...

This paper analyzes higher education funding in Germany from a distributional perspective. For this, I first compare the quantitative importance of different funding instruments, from free tuition to subsidized health insurance for students. I show that free tuition is, by far, the most...

In this paper we apply conjoint analysis as an empirical method to study the influence of tax labeling and tax earmarking on the perceived tax burden. As reference for the individual behavior we use the model of a rational utility maximizer described by the economic theory. We determine a...

Constructing measures of post-tax income inequality that are consistent with national accounts requires the allocation of the entirety of government expenditure to individuals. About half of government expenditure in the United States takes the form of in-kind collective expenditure (e.g.,...

If school closures and social-distancing experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic impeded children’s skill development, they may leave a lasting legacy in human capital. To understand the pandemic’s effects on school children, this paper combines a review of the emerging international...