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...

This paper studies a large-scale educational expansion to evaluate whether shocks to school inputs have an impact on the academic achievement of adult education students. I analyze the spillover effects of a Swedish policy that temporarily doubled enrollment in adult education, thus putting...

In 2002 the career of Colombian public school teachers was significantly reformed through the introduction of a selective entry competition and of further quality incentives. This paper estimates how the new quality-screened teachers impact students' high school performance. We exploit the fact...

Low salaries, a limited amount of full-time teaching positions, and alternative systems of allocating teaching hours lead teachers to look for additional jobs in other schools. Although this is a more common phenomenon of teacher labor markets in developing countries, teachers who teach specific...

Exploiting admission thresholds in a Regression Discontinuity Design, we study the causal effects of daycare at age 0-2 on cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes at age 8-14. One additional month in daycare reduces IQ by 0.5% (4.5% of a standard deviation). Effects for conscientiousness are small...

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...

Benjamin W. Arold prepared this study while he was working at the Center for Economics of Education at the ifo Institute. The study was completed in March 2022 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the LMU Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical essays that...

The typical measure used by researchers and school administrators to evaluate teachers is based on how the students' achievement increases after being exposed to the teacher, or based on the teacher's "value-added''. When teacher value-added is heterogeneous across her students, the typically...

In the last decade, several Latin American governments have implemented new teacher recruitment policies based on evaluations of candidates' competency and knowledge so as to raise the quality of their teachers and schools. Since 2007, the Ecuadorian government has required teacher candidates to...

Schools have been closed across the country and will remain so until September. The decision to reopen should take into account current inequalities in education across the country and the impact of school interruptions on the accumulation of cognitive skills. In this article, we document the...