This study was prepared by Martin Schlotter while he was working with the Ifo Institute for Economic Research. It was completed in June 2011 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Econcomics at the University of Munich in November 2011. It addresses the effects of different early...

We estimate the effect of age at preschool entrance on crucial noncognitive skills in theyear before school starts. Using an instrumental variable approach and exploiting cut-offdates for the time at preschool entrance we find that children entering preschool earlierin life have better...

The value-added to student achievement model has become a key tool for estimating the effects of individual teachers and their classrooms on students’ short-term academic success, and more importantly, on later-life outcomes. We use primary school data from the German National Educational...

The value-added to student achievement model has become a key tool for estimating the effects of individual teachers and their classrooms on students' short-term academic success, and more importantly, on later-life outcomes. We use primary school data from the German National Educational Panel...

International surveys of learning achievement and functional literacy are increasingly common. We consider two aspects of the robustness of their results. First, we compare results from four surveys: TIMSS, PISA, PIRLS and IALS. This contrasts with the standard approach which is to analyse a...

This paper studies the effect of longer school days - induced by voluntary all-day programs in German primary schools - on school performance. We combine data from the National Educational Panel Study covering 5348 primary school students with municipality-level information on all-day school...