The thesis „Everyday Decision Making: A Theoretical and Empirical Study“ analyzes the individuals' decision-making and the role of institutions in creating incentives and influencing individuals' choices. The first part is descriptive and theoretical and deeply rooted in behavioral public...

The thesis “Student Performance in Higher Education: Ability, Class Attendance, Mobility and the Bologna Process” empirically analyzes determinants of students’ success at university. Administrative student data as well as survey data collected at Göttingen University, Germany are used....

A simple Tiebout model is presented where states provide university education to both immobile and mobile students. State governments choose the quality of public universities by trading off the value of education for the local immobile student population and the costs, net of tuition revenues,...

A model is presented where universities competitively supply education to mobile students. Students are subject to a liquidity constraint so that tuition must be paid out of pre-university income. It is shown that student loans provided by home jurisdictions will ensure an efficient quality of...

A simple Tiebout model is presented where states provide university education to both immobile and mobile students. State governments choose the quality of public universities by trading off the value of education for the local immobile student population and the costs, net of tuition revenues,...

A model is presented where universities competitively supply education to mobile students. Students are subject to a liquidity constraint so that tuition must be paid out of pre-university income. It is shown that student loans provided by home jurisdictions will ensure an efficient quality of...

When grades lose their informative value because the percentage of students receiving the best grade rises without any corresponding increase in ability, this is called grade inflation. Conventional wisdom says that such grade inflation is unavoidable since it is essentially costless to award...

This paper studies the determinants of academic success using a unique administrative data set of a German university. We show that high school grades are strongly associated with both graduation probabilities and final grades, whereas variables measuring social origin or income have only a...