There is a successful and growing number of studies published in top-economics journals that exploit the division and re-unification of Germany as a natural experiment for analysing the effects of political regimes on economic behaviour. One strand of the literature shows that socialism shaped...

An overall picture of the education system in the countryside reveals that there are still schools that are not connected to the drinking water and sewerage systems, where the toilet is in the school yard. There are still schools where children stay in classrooms dressed up with outdoor clothing...

Social mobility is a key element of meritocratic societies. We analyze multigenerational social mobility with a hand-collected yearly Swiss dataset from 1550 to 2019. With our surname-based approach, we measure the Swiss society's overall permeability over more than 450 years. Furthermore, we...

Creating distributional national accounts (DINA; e.g. Piketty, Saez, and Zucman 2018) requires the allocation of all government expenditure to individuals in order to compute their post-tax, post-transfer income. A sizeable part of government expenditure is in-kind spending, either in the form of...

We study a mentoring program that aims to improve the labor-market prospects of schoolattending adolescents from disadvantaged families by offering them a university-student mentor. Our RCT investigates program effectiveness on three outcome dimensions that are highly predictive of adolescents'...

In recent years, educational issues have been of greater importance in economic analysis. Many papers suggest that education is essential for economic growth as well as an important tool to achieve better equality. These effects have been discussed and confirmed by several researchers, whose...

Compulsory schooling increases average level of education in a country and provides other benefits, its effect on geographical distribution is, however, not obvious. We explore the effect of a sudden change in compulsory schooling in Turkey, that increased mandatory years of schooling from five...

We analyze differences in school quality using a comprehensive panel data set covering all upper secondary school graduates in Finland during the years 2002-2013. School quality is defined as the effect of the school on matriculation exam results controlling for quality of student intake. In...

Population diversity arising from international migration does not only affect the labor market, but also its training ground – the classroom. While the economics literature studies the large and persistent achievement gap between native and foreign origin students, surprisingly little is...

This paper investigates the effect of aggregate-level information shocks regarding support for a populist right-wing party on the individual disposition to report a respective political preference in survey interviews. Despite controversial debates about the social acceptability of its...