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...

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...

Online education options have proliferated in recent years, with significant growth occurring at state-sponsored virtual schools. However, there is no prior credible evidence on the quality of virtual courses compared to in-person courses in U.S. secondary education. We compare the performance...

While there is a big literature on the benefits of pre-school education, only little is known why kindergarten attendance improves later-life outcomes. This is partly because most studies analyze the effect of complete 2 years pre-school programs. In order to shed light into the black box of...

This paper establishes a new fact about educational production: ordinal academic rank during primary school has long-run impacts on later achievement that are independent from underlying ability. Using data on the universe of English school students, we examine a setting in which the same...

How to best prepare non-college bound youth for the labor market? Different approaches compete in this field, including firm-based apprenticeships, full-time vocational schooling, and on-the-job learning. Little is known about how effective these methods are, and comparisons of means are...

In the German school and vocational education systems, there is a wide range of support measures during school-to-work transition. We analyze a novel program providing mentoring to low-achieving school leavers as a bridge between different stages and different institutional systems in secondary...

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...

I investigate whether faculty quality and department size affect the productivity of scientists. The endogeneity problems related to estimating these effects are addressed by using the dismissal of science professors by the Nazi government as a source of exogenous variation. While local faculty...