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...

In light of population ageing, globalisation, automation, and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, Thailand’s labour market is being significantly reshaped, and so are the skills required for higher employability. This paper analyses the capacity of Thailand’s education and training system...

This paper examines the returns to university education in Japan, using tuition, availability of universities, and labor market conditions as instrumental variables. To measure availability of universities, this paper uses total accredited capacity of all universities in the prefecture of...

Pop-Eleches and Urquiola (2013) apply a regression discontinuity to the Romanian secondary school system, and notably find that (a) students who go to a better school get higher scores on an exam used for university admission, (b) parents of students who get into a better school help their kids...

The problems of Italy’s education system mostly stem from its modus operandi and interactions with the expectations of families and students. The recent signs of improvement in Italian students’ proficiency, plausibly reflecting greater emphasis on rigour, could be reinforced by making...

Evidence on educational returns and the factors that determine the demand for schooling in developing countries is extremely scarce. Building on previous studies that show individuals underestimating the returns to schooling, we use two surveys from Tanzania to estimate both the actual and...

This paper demonstrates the acute sensitivity of education program effectiveness to the choices of inputs and outcome measures, using a randomized evaluation of a mother-tongue literacy program. The program raises reading scores by 0.64SDs and writing scores by 0.45SDs. A reduced-cost version...

This paper studies the effects of differential exposure to COVID-19 on educational outcomes in Guatemala. The government adopted a warning index (ranging from 0 to 10) to classify municipalities by infection rates in 2020, which was then used by the Ministry of Education in 2021 to establish a...