The paper presents a model of educational production which tries to make sense of recent evidence on effects of institutional arrangements on student performance. In a simple principal-agent framework, students choose their learning effort to maximize their net benefits, while the government...

This paper examines the role of religious denomination for human capital formation. We employ a unique data set which covers, inter alia, information on numerous measures of school inputs in 169 Swiss districts for the years 1871/72, 1881/82 and 1894/95, marks from pedagogical examinations of...

This study was prepared by Gabriela Schütz while she was working with the Ifo Institute for Economic Research. It was completed in September 2008 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Economics Department of the University of Munich (LMU). The topic of this study is an econometric analysis...

Wenn ein Unternehmer einen Blick in die Zukunft wagt und sich dazu äußert, wie er sein Unternehmen in 10 oder 20 Jahren sieht, heißt das nicht, dass diese Vorstellungen auch wahr werden. Das hängt von vielen entscheidenden Aspekten ab. Auf einige hat man direkten Einfluss, auf andere jedoch...

Wenn ein Unternehmer einen Blick in die Zukunft wagt und sich dazu äußert, wie er sein Unternehmen in 10 oder 20 Jahren sieht, heißt das nicht, dass diese Vorstellungen auch wahr werden. Das hängt von vielen entscheidenden Aspekten ab. Auf einige hat man direkten Einfluss, auf andere jedoch...

We examine whether democratic societies can escape poverty traps. Unrestricted agenda setting with simple majority rules fail to educate a society, because education-enhancing redistribution will not occur. We show that a combination of suitable constitutional rules overcomes this impossibility...

East Asian students regularly take top positions in international league tables of educational performance. Using internationally comparable student-level data, I estimate how family background and schooling policies affect student performance in five high-performing East Asian economies. Family...

In the early 2000s, a highly selective university introduced a "no-loans" policy under which the loan component of financial aid awards was replaced with grants. We use this natural experiment to identify the causal effect of student debt on employment outcomes. In the standard life-cycle model,...