Information about teachers' effectiveness at the hiring stage is particularly scarce despite its importance for personnel decisions. Using the German setting of teacher training, I investigate the relationship of teachers' pre-service cognitive and pedagogical skills as measured by two state...

Over the 2000s, many federal states in Germany shortened the duration of secondary school by one year while keeping the curriculum unchanged. Exploiting quasi-experimental variation due to the staggered introduction of this reform allows me to identify the causal effect of increased learning...

How did the introduction of the Bachelor-degree system affect students in Germany? Combining rich data on university students with administrative data on universities' study programs, we exploit variation in the timing of Bachelor-degree implementation across departments. To account for...

How did the introduction of the Bachelor-degree system affect students in Germany? Combining rich data on university students with administrative data on universities' study programs, we exploit variation in the timing of Bachelor-degree implementation across departments. To account for...

Over the 2000s, many federal states in Germany shortened the duration of secondary school by one year while keeping the curriculum unchanged. Exploiting quasi-experimental variation due to the staggered introduction of this reform allows me to identify the causal effect of increased learning...

The German system of higher education has witnessed considerable change in the first decade of the 21st century. Enabled by the 1998 amendment of the German Framework Act for Higher Education, higher education institutions have introduced Bachelor and Master degree programmes which are gradually...

Over the 2000s, many federal states in Germany shortened the duration of secondary school by one year while keeping the curriculum unchanged. Exploiting quasi-experimental variation due to the staggered introduction of this reform allows me to identify the causal effect of increased learning...

In this paper, I evaluate potential side effects of the educational expansion in Germany on the learning outcomes of today's students. The educational expansion was a demand shock in the labor market of teachers, which could have thus encouraged individuals with different teaching abilities to...

We analyze the prevalence of bullying in Germany during COVID-19, both as a real-life phenomenon (in-person bullying, or in our context: school bullying) and via social media and electronic communication tools (cyberbullying). Using Google Trends data from 2013 to 2022 and exploiting the...

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Siegler while working at the Center for the Economics of Education of the Ifo Institute. It was completed in June 2014 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich (LMU) in November 2014. The thesis includes...