This paper analyzes the returns to training that was co-financed by the German voucher program "Bildungsprämie". The estimation strategy compares outcomes of participants in voucher training with voucher recipients who intended to participate in training, but did not do so because of a random...

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...

German universities are regarded as being under-financed, inefficient, and performing below average if compared to universities in other European countries and the US. Starting in the 1990s, several German federal states implemented reforms to improve this situation. An important part of these...

To increase employee participation in training activities, the German government introduced a large-scale training voucher program in 2008 that reduces training fees by half. Based on a randomized field experiment, this paper analyzes whether providing information about the existence and the...

Educational outcomes of children are highly dependent on household and schoollevel inputs. In poor countries, remittances from migrants can provide additional funds for the education of the left behind. At the same time the absence of migrant parents can affect families’ time allocation...

Informal care reduces work on the intensive and extensive margins; however, we do not know how caregiving affects work productivity. We link two new unique national U.S. data sets to provide the first causal estimates of the effect of providing at least 80 hours of informal care in the past...

Using worker-level task data, I explore if women’s perceived comparative advantages in interactive tasks can contribute to a reduction in the gender pay gap. I find women receive lower returns to interactive tasks, even within occupations, despite increasing female employment shares in...

This paper analyzes the impact of college students’ coworker networks formed during student jobs on their labor market outcomes after graduation. For our analysis, we use novel data that links students’ administrative university records with their pre- and post-graduation employment registry...

We study the effects of retirement on cognitive functioning among women aged 63 to 67 by exploiting a German retirement reform that raised the early retirement age for women born after 1951 by three years, from 60 to 63. Our indicators of cognitive functioning are experimental measures (word...

We analyze the impact of occupational deregulation on the wages of licensed workers. To do so, we exploit a deregulation policy in the German craft sector that removed the master certificate as a requirement for starting a business in about half of the craft occupations. Specifically, we examine...