To better understand the political economy constraints of education policy, we have conducted the annual ifo Education Survey in Germany since 2014. This paper summarizes selected key findings on the German publics' preferences for education policies ranging from early childhood education and...

Political regimes influence contents of education and criteria used to select and evaluate students. We study the impact of a socialist education on the likelihood of obtaining a college degree and on several labor market outcomes by exploiting the reorganization of the school system in East...

Cross-country evidence on student achievement might be hampered by omitted country characteristics such as language or legal differences. This paper uses cross-state variation in Germany, whose sixteen states share the same language and legal system, but pursue different education policies. The...

Incomplete information is a commitment device for time consistency problems. In the context of time consistent labor income taxation privacy can lead to a Pareto superior outcome and increases the effectiveness of public education as a second best policy

Cognitive performance in late adulthood is critical for better welfare and understanding the causes of human capital depreciation in old age is increasingly crucial in aging societies. Using data from South Africa, we study how early life education affects cognition, a component of human capital...

Evaluations of adults in formal education (AE) are typically based on earnings measured 5-10 years after program enrollment. This paper estimates returns up to 24 years after enrollment, and explore results for 15 cohorts of first-time registered in AE in Sweden 1994-2008 with at least a 10-year...

We investigate the long-run impact of college remedial education on students' academic performance and employment status. By implementing a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design we show that attending remedial courses positively affects the probability to get a university degree, whereas no...

This paper tests whether and how two education policies: (i) increasing the length of compulsory education and (ii) introducing foreign languages into compulsory school curricula, affect subsequent migration across European countries. We construct a novel data base that includes information on...

Non-cognitive skills programs may be an important policy option to improve the academic outcomes of adolescents. In this paper, we evaluate experimentally the EPIS program, which is based on bi-weekly individual or small-group non-cognitive mediation short meetings with low-performing students....

This paper evaluates whether the expansion of higher education is economically worthwhile based on a recent surge in the number of campuses and college graduates in Russia. Our empirical strategy relies on the marginal treatment effect method in both normal and semi‐parametric versions, and...