Franziska Bernadette Hampf prepared this study while she was working at the ifo Center for the Economics of Education. The study was completed in September 2019 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical...

We extend the Lucas' 1988 model introducing two classes of agents with heterogeneous skills, discount factors and initial human capital endowments. We consider two regimes according to the planner's political constraints. In the first regime, that we call meritocracy, the planner faces...

A well-established empirical literature suggests that individual wages are persistent. Several theoretical arguments support this empirical finding. Yet, the standard approach to the estimation of schooling returns does not account for this fact. This paper investigates the consequences of...

We exploit a recent state-level reform in Germany that granted parents the right to decide on the highest secondary school track suitable for their child, changing the purpose of the primary teacher's recommendation from mandatory to informational. Applying a disaggre-gated synthetic control...

We exploit a recent state-level reform in Germany that granted parents the right to decide on the highest secondary school track suitable for their child, changing the purpose of the primary teacher's recommendation from mandatory to informational. Applying a disaggregated synthetic control...

The growth of the college wage premium decelerated after the 1980s and even more so since 2000. The deceleration challenges the skill-biased technological change theory which is the most powerful explanation for the rapid growth in the 1980s. In this research, I build a model that captures the...

We quantify firm heterogeneity in skill returns and present direct evidence of worker–firm complementarities. Within a model of firms' demand for cognitive and noncognitive attributes we show that identification depends on the availability of skill measures. Linking administrative data to test...

In this paper we investigate the effect of Head Start on long term education and labor market outcomes using data from the NLSY79. The contributions to the existing literature on the effectiveness of Head Start are threefold: (1) we are the first to examine distributional effects of Head Start...

In this paper we investigate the effect of Head Start on long term education and labor market outcomes using data from the NLSY79. The contributions to the existing literature on the effectiveness of Head Start are threefold: (1) we are the first to examine distributional effects of Head Start...