New technologies offer many promises to improve student learning, but efforts to bring them to the classroom often fail to produce improvements to student outcomes. A notable exception to this pattern is one-to-one laptop programs. While early evaluations of these programs have been encouraging,...

We use Danish register data to investigate whether the effects of schoolmates' gender and average parental education on individual educational achievement, employment and earnings vary with individual family characteristics such as the gender of siblings and own parental education. We find that...

Information about teachers' effectiveness at the hiring stage is particularly scarce despite its importance for personnel decisions. Using the German setting of teacher training, I investigate the relationship of teachers' pre-service cognitive and pedagogical skills as measured by two state...

We exploit a recent state-level reform in Germany that granted parents the right to decide on the highest secondary school track suitable for their child, changing the purpose of the primary teacher's recommendation from mandatory to informational. Applying a disaggregated synthetic control...

We examine whether parental and school investments reinforce or compensate for student performance. Our analysis exploits school-starting-age rules in 34 countries, capturing achievement variation that arises because younger children typically underperform their older peers. Parents respond to...

The Bologna Process aimed at harmonizing European higher education systems and at increasing their efficiency. This paper analyzes impacts of the Bologna Reform for Germany by using unique micro data from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU). We estimate treatment effects on the probability to...

Benjamin W. Arold prepared this study while he was working at the Center for Economics of Education at the ifo Institute. The study was completed in March 2022 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the LMU Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical essays that...

Relatively little is known about the youth labour market in general and about gender differences in Mongolia, one of the fifty poorest countries in the world. This paper addresses the issue by taking advantage of a School to Work Survey (SWTS) on young people aged 15-29 years carried out in...

Relatively little is known about the youth labour market in general and about gender differences in Mongolia, one of the fifty poorest countries in the world. This paper addresses the issue by taking advantage of a School to Work Survey (SWTS) on young people aged 15-29 years carried out in...

We estimate the impact of education on productivity, wage costs and productivity-wage gaps (i.e. profits) using Belgian linked panel data. Findings highlight that educational credentials have a stronger impact on productivity than on wage costs. Firms’ profitability is found to rise when lower...