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...

We study the allocation of German lawyers to regional courts for legal trainee-ships. Because of excess demand in some regions lawyers often have to wait before being allocated. The currently used "Berlin" mechanism is not weakly Pareto efficient, does not eliminate justified envy and does not...

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....

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...

This paper evaluates the effects of a high school curriculum reform that was introduced in one German state on high school dropout. The reform increased the standards of the curriculum by reducing the freedom of choice in course selection (amongst other things) resulting in an increase in the...

Education systems can be viewed as complex systems, by considering that learning, teaching, cognition and education are phenomena resulting from interactions between the heterogeneous agents that compose such systems. Given the complex nature of education systems, new approaches seem relevant,...

Career guidance assists students with the school-to-work transition. Based on a survey in secondary schools in Germany, we analyze career guidance activities and how these affect career plans. The take-up of career guidance depends upon the school track attended and upon the school and class...

It is well established that teachers are the most important in-school factor in determining student outcomes. However, to date there is scant robust quantitative research demonstrating that teacher training programs can have lasting impacts on student test scores. To address this gap, we conduct...

To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first study for Germany to assess the long-term impacts of studying without graduating on three labour market outcomes (working hours, wages, and occupational prestige), and on overall life satisfaction, on the basis of a sample of employed...

We study the link between geographic political representation and geographic distribution of public goods within local jurisdictions using geo-coded data on politicians, the electorate and elementary school closures. We find that poorer neighborhoods are under-represented. Inequality in...