Over the 2000s, many federal states in Germany shortened the duration of secondary school by one year while keeping the curriculum unchanged. Exploiting quasi-experimental variation due to the staggered introduction of this reform allows me to identify the causal effect of increased learning...

Violence at schools is a well-known problem in many societies. This paper assesses the degree of school violence in 11 European countries and analyzes the determinants of being a victim and its effect on student performance. The study draws on the international TIMSS 2003 and the British...

A simple model of decentralised graduation standards is presented. It is shown that a school whose students are disadvantaged on the labour market applies less demanding standards because such students have less incentives to graduate. The model's predictions are tested using Dutch school-level...

This paper shows that earnings losses after unemployment increase with age. First, older employees start out with relatively high earnings in comparison to employees without employment interruptions several years before the non-employment spell. This earnings advantage turns into a strong...

Labour market reforms that are designed to stimulate labour supply at the lower end of the wage distribution can never be precisely restricted to affect only the target group. Spillovers to and feedback from other segments of the labour market are unavoidable and may counteract the direct...

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the years 2000 to 2006 we analyze the determinants and labor market effects of educational dropout. In addition to classical variables like family background and occupation, we examine noncognitive skills and Internet use. Noncognitive skills...

This paper provides firm-level evidence for the relationship between the age structure of the workforce and the adoption of new or significantly improved technologies in service sector firms. Furthermore, it closes a research gap by analyzing the joint impact of the age of the workforce and the...

This study tests for financial constraints on R&D investment and how they differ from capital investment. To identify constraints in the access to external capital, we employ a credit rating index. Our models show that internal constraints, measured by mark-ups, are more decisive for R&D than...

This paper examines return predictability when the investor is uncertain about the right state variables. A novel feature of the model averaging approach used in this paper is to account for finite-sample bias of the coefficients in the predictive regressions. Drawing on an extensive...