Public preferences for charging tuition are important for determining higher education finance. To test whether public support for tuition depends on information and design, we devise several survey experiments in representative samples of the German electorate (N19,500). The electorate is...

We show that the electorate's preferences for using tuition to finance higher education strongly depend on the design of the payment scheme. In representative surveys of the German electorate (N18,000), experimentally replacing regular upfront by deferred income-contingent payments increases...

Higher education finance depends on the public's preferences for charging tuition, which may be partly based on beliefs about the university earnings premium. To test whether public support for tuition depends on earnings information, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of the...

Capital deepening may affect the evolution of the wage differential between skilled and unskilled workers differently in countries with different labor market institutions. If labor market institutions raise the relative wage of unskilled workers in Germany, firms have incentives to invest...

This paper examines the relationship between product demand and the pattern of rising skill premia and rising employment of skilled workers in the US and the UK since the 1980s. If more skilled workers demand more skill-intensive goods, then an increase in relative skill supply will also induce...

An emerging economic literature over the past decade has made use of international tests of educational achievement to analyze the determinants and impacts of cognitive skills. The cross-country comparative approach provides a number of unique advantages over national studies: It can exploit...

Many contributions suggest that earnings instability has increased during the 1980s and1990s. This paper develops and estimates an on-the-job search model of the labor market tostudy the contribution of wage inequality and job mobility in explaining earnings instability. Tostudy the evolution...

We estimate the effect of class size on student performance in 18 countries, combining school fixed effects and instrumental variables to identify random class-size variation between two adjacent grades within individual schools. Conventional estimates of class-size effects are shown to be...

We investigate whether a causal interpretation of the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth is appropriate and whether cross-country evidence supports a case for the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking...