This paper estimates the effect of a full year of the COVID-19 pandemic on school performance, focusing on students at the end of upper secondary school who are about to enter the labour market or start university without having had the opportunity to recover. Using longitudinal data from...

This paper investigates the short-term effects of public smoking bans on individual smoking behavior. In 2007 and 2008, state-level smoking bans were gradually introduced in all of Germany's sixteen federal states. We exploit this variation in the timing of state bans to identify the effect that...

We study the impact of short-term exposure to ambient air pollution on the spread and severity of COVID-19 in Germany. We combine data on county-by-day level on confirmed cases and deaths with information on local air quality and weather conditions and exploit short-term variation in the...

This paper studies marriage market effects of the student gender composition for university graduates using German Microcensus data and aggregate information on the student sex ratio by field of study for 41 different fields from 1977 to 2011. Experiencing a higher own-gender share of students...

Gender differences in the STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines are widespread in most OECD countries and mathematics is the only subject where typically girls tend to underperform with respect to boys. This paper describes the gender gap in math test scores in Italy,...