Curriculum tracking, the separation of secondary school students into academic and vocational tracks, correlates positively with pretracking achievement in both British and international data. I argue that this correlation is caused by the incentives emanating from the track placement decision....

We examine whether anti-establishment outsider movements can leverage education and youth mobilization to build long-run political power. We study the expansion of state-run religious secondary schools in 1970s Türkiye and show that access to these schools catalyzed the emergence of Islamist...

This paper examines the impact of tuition fees on graduation rates among high-school leavers. We analyse the introduction of fees in several German states in 2006-07 (around EUR 1,000 annually), using administrative microdata on all university graduates and a difference-in-differences approach....

Though the use of tracking policies to stratify students is commonplace, evi- dence concerning the effects of ability-based tracking on student performance is mixed. Using rich data from the Hungarian secondary school centralized assignment mechanism and a quasi-experimental framework, we find...

Educational tracking-separating students into tracks or schools by ability-is commonplace, but access and preferences for top programs often depend on socioeconomic status (SES), reinforcing inequality. We study shadow education in the context of an early-tracking system, exploiting score...

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...

The standard assumption of exogenous policy preferences implies that parties set their positions according to their voters' preferences. We investigate the reverse effect: Are the electorates' policy preferences responsive to party positions? In a representative German survey, we inform...

This paper studies responses to high-stakes incentives arising from early ability tracking. We use three complementary research designs exploiting differences in school track admission rules at the end of primary school in Germany’s early ability tracking system. Our results show that the need...

We study whether compulsory religious education in schools affects students’ religiosity as adults. We exploit the staggered termination of compulsory religious education across German states in models with state and cohort fixed effects. Using three different datasets, we find that abolishing...

Learning at school and university and also at the work place has become more important in the knowledge-based economy. This paper provides a critical review of recent econometric work on the determinants and impacts of training in Europe. Training has non negligible positive effects for firms...