This doctoral thesis analyses the impact of education and other determinants on labour market outcomes using microeconometric methods. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction. Chapter 2 uses a randomised field experiment among German human resource managers to evaluate which skill signals such as...

We comment on the work of Hanushek et al. (2015) and show that returns to skills are very heterogeneous and depend crucially on the tasks performed in the workplace, in line with the critique by Acemoglu and Autor (2011). Depending on the type of tasks performed at work, as well as on...

We comment on the work of Hanushek et al. (2015) and show that returns to skills are very heterogeneous and depend crucially on the tasks performed in the workplace, in line with the critique by Acemoglu and Autor (2011). Depending on the type of tasks performed at work, as well as on...

This paper studies a model where student effort and talent interact with parental and teachers' investments, as well as with school system resources. The model is rich, yet sufficiently stylized to provide novel implications. It can show, for example, that an improvement in parental outside...

This paper analyses the effects of labour market expectations and admission probabilities on students' application strategies to higher education. The starting hypothesis of this study is that students consider the expected utility of their choices, a function of expected net lifetime earnings...

It is still taken for granted that (early) ability tracking increases the impact of social origin on achievement in (lower) secondary education, but without gains in the overall level. This contribution addresses the question of whether this common conviction is really correct. The various...

This is the first paper to estimate the effect of teacher strikes on student long-run educational attainment and labor market outcomes. We exploit cross-cohort variation in the prevalence of teacher strikes within and across provinces in Argentina in a difference-in-difference framework to...

This paper investigates if higher public spending in education and better teacher qualifications are related to student’s performance, using data from Saber 11, a national standardized test conducted by Instituto Colombiano para la Evaluación de la Educación. The estimation exploits...

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...

Personality traits, preferences, and attitudes significantly influence labor market outcomes, and these non-cognitive skills are shaped by the social environment. While curriculum interventions can impact these skills, the effect of compulsory education on noncognitive skills is less well...