Katharina Wedel prepared this study while she was working at the Center for the Economics of Education at the ifo Institute. The study was completed in September 2023 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at LMU Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical essays that...

Recent evidence suggests a positive effect of the quantity of instruction on student achievement. In this paper, I focus on the interaction between the quantity and the quality of instruction. Using international TIMSS data, I exploit within-student between-subject variation. I find that on...

We extend the standard quality-ladder model with heterogeneous workers by including efficiency wages and unions. We find that higher union bargaining power leads to a negative relationship between growth and unemployment. An increase in the supply of human capital, however, on the one hand...