Proponents of tracking argue that the creation of more homogeneous classes increases efficiency while opponents fear that tracking aggravates initial differences between students. We estimate the effects on the intergenerational transmission of education of a reform that delayed tracking by two...

We investigate the effect of higher education on the evolution of inequality. In so doing we propose a novel overlapping generations model with three social classes: the rich, the middle class, and the poor. We show that there is an initial phase in which no social class invests in higher...

Using German register data for the period between 1970 and 2010, this paper studies the labor market consequences of being born during the German food crisis after World War II. The paper finds that those born during the first half of 1946---about nine months after the period of most severe...

The US and many European countries are witnessing substantial changes in the wage structure (Autor et al. 2006; Dustmann et al., 2009). Previous research has focused on changing returns to education and experience (Katz and Murphy, 1992), changes in the workforce composition (Lemieux, 2006), or the...

We study a possible nurture effect of political systems on the evolution of gender differences in work preferences by exploiting the 41-year division of Germany and its reunification in 1990 as a natural experiment. We investigate whether disparate political and social systems produced different...

This paper investigates how the increasing labor supply of fresh graduates with modern IT (information technology) skills impacts the careers of incumbent workers during periods of fundamental technological change. To identify the causal effect within a difference-in-difference framework, we...

This paper exploits exceptions in the application of employment protection legislation (EPL) to small firms beneath a particular size threshold to test the theoretical hypothesis that EPL increases the incentives of firms to train their employees in a regression discontinuity setting. Using...

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...

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...