The purpose of this dissertation is to address policy makers to change the way they think about increasing obesity rates. So far the discussion revolves around increasing incomes and imposing taxes on high fat food, despite their disputed effectiveness. Most of these studies seem to neglect the...

Child care and education are important inputs in the human capital production function. The research of Nobel prize winner James Heckman shows that skills are built from the early childhood on and increase the returns of later educational inputs, in short: skill begets skill. Therefore, it is...

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Siegler while working at the Center for the Economics of Education of the Ifo Institute. It was completed in June 2014 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich (LMU) in November 2014. The thesis includes...