In this paper, we examine the heterogeneous treatment effects of a universal child care (preschool) program in Germany by exploiting the exogenous variation in attendance caused by a reform that led to a large staggered expansion across municipalities. Drawing on novel administrative data from...

This paper investigates the effect of a unique child labor ban regulation on employment and school enrollment. The ban implemented in Mexico in 2015, increased the minimum working age from 14 to 15, introduced restrictions to employ underage individuals, and imposed penalties for the violation...

Child labor is a matter of international concern. This paper examines the effect of a program that extended the length of a school day from four to six or eight hours in Mexico, on school enrollment, time spent on schooling activities, and child labor of children aged 7 to 14. To identify the...

The Bologna Process aimed at harmonizing European higher education systems and at increasing their efficiency. This paper analyzes impacts of the Bologna Reform for Germany by using unique micro data from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU). We estimate treatment effects on the probability to...

Assuming isoelastic returns to education and an endogenous supply of qualified and nonqualified labour, it is shown to be second-best efficient not to distort the choice of education. Furthermore, taxation should set incentives so that qualified labour is substituted for nonqualified labour. As...

Assuming a two-period model with endogenous choices of labour, education, and saving, it is shown to be second-best efficient to deviate from Ramsey's Rule and to distort qualified labour less than nonqualified labour. Furthermore, if the earnings function displays constant elasticity, the...

It is generally agreed that the funding base for German universities is inadequate and perhaps the time has come for serious consideration of the imposition of nontrivial tuition charges. Against this background, this paper compares conventional and income contingent loans for financing tuition...

Bovenberg and Jacobs (2005) and Richter (2009) derive the education effi ciency theorem: In a second-best optimum, the education decision is undistorted if the function expressing the stock of human capital features a constant elasticity with respect to education. I drop this assumption. The...

This paper studies a Ramsey optimal taxation model with human capital in an infinite-horizon setting. Contrary to Jones, Manuelli, and Rossi (1997), the human capital production function does not include the current stock of human capital as a production factor. As a result, the return to human...

Five years after introducing tuition fees, the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) abolished them in March 2011. Using student-level panel data, we assess the effects of this reform on academic activity and performance in two universities in NRW: a state university and a private...