Following German reunification the East German states were confronted with the need to adapt their schooling system to quality criteria settled by the western states. Most importantly this included an extension of high school education by one year. We use this variation in high school duration...

If information asymmetries prevent talented students of non-academic backgrounds from applying for merit-based aid, the full potential of qualified youth will not be unfolded and social selectivity is likely to corroborate. This paper analyzes whether information asymmetries exist and decrease...

We use the recent introduction of tuition fees at public universities in seven of the sixteen German states to identify the effects of tuition fees on university enrollment of first-year students at German public universities. Our study differs from previous research in two important ways....

Lifelong learning becomes increasingly important in times of population ageing, but little is known about the returns to adult education or the effectiveness of government attempts to promote adult learning. This paper evaluates the effects of a large-scale randomized field experiment with...

We study education and income tax policies in a model with endogenous selection into college. Our framework is strongly influenced by the empirical college literature and incorporates heterogenous returns and tastes for college, earnings risk (implying uncertain returns to college) and...

This study analyses the effect of an increase in college costs on student achievement, particularly time-to-degree and performance. I exploit a unique policy at a Swiss university to identify and estimate the causal effect of an increase in tuition. Students faced an unexpected raise in tuition....

We characterize optimal redistribution in a dynastic economy with observable human capital and hidden ability. We compute the optimal allocation and show how it can be implemented with student loans or means-tested grants. The numerical results reveal that human capital investment should decline...

This paper estimates the percentage of students who do not take up their federal need-based student financial aid entitlements and sheds light on determinants of this behavior. Against the background that educational mobility in Germany is low although extensive student financial aid for needy...

In the middle of the nineties the rural population in Burkina Faso was seriously hit by rising food prices. Whereas cotton farmers were able to cope with this shock given the simultaneous boom in the cotton sector, food crop farmers had to withdraw children from school and to let them work more...