Academic careers in Germany have been under debate for a while. We conduct a survey among postdocs in Germany, to analyze the perceptions and attitudes of postdocs regarding their research incentives, their working conditions, and their career prospects. We conceptualize the career prospects of...

This study analyses the persistence and true state dependence of overqualification, i.e. a mismatch between workers' qualifications and their jobs’ educational requirements. Employing individual-level panel data for Germany, I find that overqualification is highly persistent among tertiary...

This paper analyzes how high-ability students respond to different indicators of university quality when applying for a university. Are some quality dimensions of a ranking, e.g. research reputation or mentoring more important than others? I estimate a random utility model using administrative...

Applying a differences-in-differences strategy, I study the decentralization of university admission as a natural experiment. Is the centralized or decentralized procedure better suited to match prospective students to universities? The analysis uses administrative data on all students within...

Studies on the underlying mechanisms of social mobility commonly find that half of the intergenerational earnings persistence remains unexplained. Focusing on the phenomenon of overqualification, this study examines a transmission channel that might operate beyond the mechanisms previously...

We identify effects of age at school entry (ASE) on the development of child temperament. Our analysis is based on psychometric measures from a longitudinal cohort study of children in the Rhine-Neckar region in central Germany. In children with a higher ASE due to a birthday late in the year,...

In this paper, we examine how orphanhood affects children’s educational and health outcomes in eleven sub-Saharan African countries. Our analysis is based on a comparison of orphans and non-orphaned children living under the same conditions. We also examine the impacts of various family...

Despite the interdependence between cognitive and noncognitive skills, empirical studies have shown a longer period of acquisition in life-time for the latter besides relevance for educational and labor market success. Analyzing returns of investments during different periods of life is...

Graduates from Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) are usually found to have higher wages and a lower risk of overqualification. However, it is unclear whether we can interpret the effect of STEM subjects on overqualification and wages in a causal way, since individuals...

We analyse the determinants of dropout from secondary and vocational education in Germany using data from the Socio-Economic Panel from 2000 to 2007. In addition to the role of classical variables like family background and school achievements, we examine the effect of noncognitive skills. Both,...