The purpose of this paper is to analyze the efficiency of the 26 Swiss cantons over the period 2000 to 2004 applying Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). A Total Public Sector Performance (TPSP) indicator for eight local government activities (administration, public safety, education, culture and...

We use data on Austrian firms and employees to estimate the effects of employer-provided training on productivity, wages, and the inequality of wages within firms. While the average amount spent on employer-provided training is low in general, we find a robust positive elasticity of training on...

Gender segregation in the labor market may be explained by women's re-luctance to choose technical occupations, although the foundations for career choices are certainly laid earlier, during education. Educational experts claim that female students are doing better in math and science and are...

In this paper, I study the impact of immigrant concentration in primary schools on educational outcomes of native and migrant students in a major Austrian city between 1980-2001. The outcome measures of interest are track attendance after primary education and grade repetition. Using variation...

A substantial share of university instruction happens in tutorial sessions - small group instruction given parallel to lectures. In this paper, we study whether instructors with a higher academic rank teach tutorials more effectively in a setting where students are randomly assigned to tutorial...

The idea that students benefit from same-sex teachers has motivated policies around the world aimed at reducing gender inequalities. However, we do not know the size or generalizability of such same-sex teacher effects. We fill this gap by conducting a meta-analysis and our own study using data...

We study same-sex role model effects of teachers with a meta-analysis and our own study of three million students in 90 countries. Both approaches show that role model effects on performance are, on average, small: 0.030 SD in the meta-analysis and 0.015 SD in our multi-country study. Going...

This paper investigates how the peer gender composition in university affects students' major choices and labor market outcomes. Women who are randomly assigned to more female peers become less likely to choose male-dominated majors, they end up in jobs where they work fewer hours and their wage...