In this paper, we investigate sibling correlations in educational outcomes, which serve as a broad measure of the importance of family and community background. Making use of rich longitudinal survey and register data for Denmark, our main aim is to identify the parental background...

Western labor markets face major challenges caused by demographic changes. They increasingly experience a shortage of skilled workers and face the problem of an increasing disparity between a reduced group of active workers contributing to the pension scheme and a rising share of an older...

Most German states have reformed university preparatory schooling by reducing duration from 13 to 12 years with unchanged graduation requirements. The reform was implemented in the states during the last decade in several consecutive years. In this paper, we use nationwide data on high school...

This paper investigates two mechanisms through which education may affect cognitive skills in adolescence: the role of instructional quantity and the timing of instruction with respect to age. To identify causal effects, I exploit a school reform carried out at the state level in Germany as a...

We study the impact of a student's ordinal rank in a high-school cohort on educational attainment several years later. To identify a causal effect, we compare multiple cohorts within the same school, exploiting exogenous variation in cohort composition. We nd that a student's ordinal rank in...

A growing body of research suggests that, even after controlling for cognitive abilities, personality predicts economic success in later life. The learning environment at school focuses on knowledge and cognitive skills. The transmission of character skills, however, is not at the center of...

Governments around the world are making it a priority to upgrade information and communication technologies (ICT) with the aim to increase available internet connection speeds. This paper proposes a new empirical methodology to estimate the causal effect of these policies, and applies it to the...

Most studies find little to no effect of classroom computers on student achievement. We suggest that this null effect may combine positive effects of computer uses without equivalently effective alternative traditional teaching practices and negative effects of uses that substitute more...

With girls having overtaken boys in many education indicators, the feminization of elementary school teaching is causing debates across the globe about disadvantages for male students. Using administrative panel data on the universe of students, teachers and schools for a German state, I exploit...

This study investigates the effect of missed instruction time in school on short-term educational performance as well as long-term retirement income and mortality. Using self-gathered Swedish register data, we are able to distinguish total days of absence within a school year and missed...