Since their first implementation in 2000, the PISA studies have attracted public attention and spurred the demand for institutional changes in schooling systems. The introduction of standardized student tests and of incentives for schools and teachers are notable examples of such institutional...

We analyze the effect of education on wages using German Socio-Economic Panel data and regional variation in mandatory years of schooling and the supply of schools. This allows us to estimate more than one local average treatment effect and heterogeneous effects for different groups of...

This paper considers the role of school closures in the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. To isolate the impact of the closures from other containment measures and identify a causal effect, we exploit variation in the start and end dates of the summer school and fall holiday across the 16 federal...

This paper examines the patterns of educational assortative mating in East and West Germany. In the literature it is well known that individuals do not mate randomly with respect to social and cultural traits, and that highly assortative mating can lead to polarization and exacerbate economic...

This study analyzes the educational attainment and early labor market outcomes of young migrants from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) who arrived in Germany between 1989 and 1994. The results reveal that migrants have lower educational attainments than natives, and that within the group of...

There is a large literature on the influence of institutional characteristics on student academic achievement. In contrast, relatively little research focuses on student time allocation and its effects on student performance. This paper contributes to the literature by investigating the effect...

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...

Economic theory that underlies many empirical microeconomic applications predicts that treatment responses depend on individuals’ characteristics and location on the outcome distribution. Using data from a large-scale Pakistani school report card experiment, we consider tests for treatment...

Despite similar levels of per capita income, education, and technology the development of labour shares in OECD countries has displayed different patterns since 1960. The paper examines the role of demography in this regard. Employing an overlapping generations model we first examine the...

This paper argues that typical applications of panel unit root tests should take possible nonstationarity in the volatility process of the innovations of the panel time series into account. Nonstationarity volatility arises for instance when there are structural breaks in the innovation...