This paper investigates the effects of tuition fees on the university enrollment and location decision of high school graduates in Germany. After a Federal Constitutional Court decision in 2005, 7 out of 16 German federal states introduced tuition fees for higher education. In the empirical...

This paper analyzes the effect of the introduction of performance-related funding in the German university sector. Starting in the 1990‘s, the federal states of Germany introduced incentive-based funding systems in order to increase universities‘ performance and efficiency. We estimate the...

The lottery of birth draws some children into deprived environments and others into environments where they thrive. In a field experiment in rural India with 10-20 months old children we test two scalable interventions to reduce early disadvantages in health and mental development. We distribute...

Field experiments which test the application of behavioural insights to policy design have become popular to inform policy decisions. This study is the first to empirically examine who and what drives these experiments with public partners. Through a mixed-methods approach, based on a novel...

This paper investigates the effects of tuition fees on the university enrollment and location decision of high school graduates in Germany. After a Federal Constitutional Court decision in 2005, 7 out of 16 German federal states introduced tuition fees for higher education. In the empirical...

While results from individual Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) often do not hold beyond their setting, the accumulation of many RCTs can be used to guide policy. But how many studies are required to confidently generalize? Our paper examines construct validity, an often neglected yet...

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...

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...

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...