This study analyzes the effect of education on the number of children, childlessness, and the timing of births. We use exogenous variation from a mandatory reform of compulsory schooling in West Germany to deal with the endogeneity of schooling. In contrast to studies for other developed...

This study expands the literature on the determinants of educational attainment by analyzing the effects of birth order in Germany. These effects are typically attributed to sibling rivalry for parental resources. Using data from the German Life History Study on birth cohorts 1945-1978, we find...

Gender segregation in the labor market may be explained by women's re-luctance to choose technical occupations, although the foundations for career choices are certainly laid earlier, during education. Educational experts claim that female students are doing better in math and science and are...

We study the contribution of health-related behaviors to the health-education gradient by distinguishing between short-run and long-run mediating effects: while in the former only current or lagged behaviors are taken into account, in the latter we consider the entire history of behaviors. We...

We study the relationship between education and cognitive functioning at older ages by exploiting compulsory schooling reforms, implemented in six European countries during the 1950s and 1960s. Using data of individuals aged 50+ from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE),...

In the Austrian (as well as the German) education system students have to choose between different school tracks at the age of 10. We argue that early tracking creates inefficiencies because the earlier the track choice has to be made, the more it is influenced by factors other than innate...

In this paper, I study the impact of immigrant concentration in primary schools on educational outcomes of native and migrant students in a major Austrian city between 1980-2001. The outcome measures of interest are track attendance after primary education and grade repetition. Using variation...

Low teacher motivation and its detrimental effect on student achievement are central problems of many education systems in Africa. Using standardized data for student achievement in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d`Ivoire, Madagascar and Senegal, this paper analyzes the empirical links between...

This study applies rich data from the 2000 Swiss census to investigate the patterns of intergenerational education transmission for natives and second generation immigrants. The level of secondary schooling attained by youth aged 17 is related to their parents' educational outcomes using data on...

Due to tight public budget constraints, the efficiency of publicly financed universities in Germany is receiving increasing attention in the academic as well as in the public discourse. Against this background we analyze the efficiency of 72 public German universities for the years 1998 to 2003,...