Do increased instruction hours improve the performance of all students? Using PISA scores of students in ninth grade, we analyse the effect of a German education reform that increased weekly instruction hours by two hours (6.5 percent) overalmost five years. In the additional time, students are...

It is well established that teachers are the most important in-school factorin determining student outcomes. However, to date there is scant robustquantitative research demonstrating that teacher training programs can havelasting impacts on student test scores. To address this gap, weconduct...

It is still an open question whether increasing life expectancy as such is causing higher health care expenditures (HCE) in a population. According to the "red herring" hypothesis, the positive correlation between age and HCE is exclusively due to the fact that mortality rises with age and a...

This document provides an overview of the long-term care system, the number and develop-ment of beneficiaries and the long-term care policy in Denmark. The report is part of the first stage of the European project ANCIEN (Assessing Needs of Care in European Nations), commissioned by the European...

This document provides an overview of the long-term care system, the number and develop-ment of beneficiaries and the long-term care policy in Germany. The report is part of the first stage of the European project ANCIEN (Assessing Needs of Care in European Nations), commissioned by the European...

Germany introduced a new mandatory insurance for long-term care in 1995 as part of its social security system. It replaced a system based on means tested social welfare. Benefits from the long-term care insurance are not means tested and depend on the required level of care. The insurance...

This paper uses administrative data to investigate how a change in pension wealth affects a mother’s employment decision after child birth. I exploit the extension of the child care pension benefit in 1992 as a natural experiment in a regression discontinuity design to estimate short- and...

Parental leave and subsidized child care are prominent examples of family policies supporting the reconciliation of family life and labor market careers for mothers. In this paper, we combine different empirical strategies to evaluate the employment effects of these policies for mothers in...

We show that hosting the Olympic Games in 2012 had a positive impact on the life satisfaction and happiness of Londoners during the Games, compared to residents of Paris and Berlin. Notwithstanding issues of causal inference, the magnitude of the effects is equivalent to moving from the bottom...

Effective attention to information may play a prominent role in consumer choice for energy-intensive services and it may simply be a function of receiving timely information when consumption takes place. This paper investigates whether and why the timing of utility bills leads to salience bias...