In this paper, I evaluate potential side effects of the educational expansion in Germany on the learning outcomes of today's students. The educational expansion was a demand shock in the labor market of teachers, which could have thus encouraged individuals with different teaching abilities to...

In this paper, we study the extent to which ministers engage in regional favoritism. We are the first to provide a comprehensive analysis of a larger set of the governing elite, not just focusing on the primary leader. We manually collect birthplaces of this governing elite globally. Combining...

Motivated by recent disasters, this paper analyzes the risk sharing aspect in a federation. The regions can be hit by a shock leading to losses that occur with an exogenous probability and in a stochastically independent way. The regions can spend effort on self-insurance to reduce the size of...

Motivated by recent disasters, this paper analyzes the risk sharing aspect in a federation. The regions can be hit by a shock leading to losses that occur with an exogenous probability and in a stochastically independent way. The regions can spend effort on self-insurance to reduce the size of...

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...

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...

Many studies have shown that childhood circumstances can have long term consequences that persist until old age. To better understand the transmission of early life circumstances, this paper analyses the effects of health and financial situation during childhood on quality of life after...

The effect of marijuana liberalization on crime is object of a large interest by social scientists and policy-makers. However, due to the scarcity of relevant data, the displacement effect of liberalization on the supply of illegal drugs remained substantially unexplored. This paper exploits the...

The development of expenditure for care services is one of the most intensively debated topics in public. However, studies calculating financial provision gaps only focus on the macro-level implications for the compulsory care insurance. In contrast, this paper examines the individuals'...

The development of expenditure for care services is one of the most intensively debated topics in public. However, studies calculating financial provision gaps only focus on the macro-level implications for the compulsory care insurance. In contrast, this paper examines the individuals’...