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...

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...

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’...

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...

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...

Compulsory military service typically drafts young men when they are at the height of their learning ability. Thus, it can be expected to depress the demand for higher education since skill atrophy and the delayed entry into the civilian labor market reduce the returns to human-capital...

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...

Bovenberg and Jacobs (2005) and Richter (2009) derive the education efficiency 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...