This paper focuses on a long-standing challenge for standard setters: what kind of standards should they write? How specific and prescriptive should standards be? How should cost considerations influence requirements? How should standard setters balance comparability with effective communication...

In this paper, we estimate the effect of pupil?s relative age within the first grade of primary school on math and reading test scores at age 15. The main objective is to evaluate the long-term causal effect of relative age in the first grades of primary school on pupil?s test in 16 different...

This paper compares trends in wage inequality in the U.S. and Germany using an approach developed by MaCurdy and Mroz (1995) to separate age, time, and cohort effects. Between 1979 and 2004, wage inequality increased strongly in both the U.S. and Germany but there were various country specific...

In times of genetically modified food, globalized production and distribution chains, food safety is a major issue in public policy. Although industrial actors have traditionally had remarkable influence on political decision-making in this area, challenger organizations from civil society have...

DIW Berlin has examined the effects of investment in research and development on economic growth in Germany and other OECD countries. Their results show that an increase of one percentage point in research and development spending in the economy as a whole leads to a short-term average increase...

Das DIW Berlin hat die Wachstumswirkungen von Investitionen in Forschung und Entwicklung in Deutschland und weiteren OECD-Ländern untersucht. Demnach führt ein Anstieg des Wachstums der gesamtwirtschaftlichen Forschungsausgaben um einen Prozentpunkt kurzfristig zu einer Erhöhung des Wachstums...

With university education continuing to expand worldwide, university dropouts will make up a large group in future labor markets. Dropping out is routinely viewed as a negative indicator. However, data on university dropouts does not generally provide information on their labor market outcomes,...

The HR practices of the former state-socialist countries have gone through significant changes. The analysis of the developments, built on the Cranet (2004) survey, intends to describe the similarities and differences found between 6 countries of the Central Eastern European region and the total...

The beginning of the employment career is often associated with phases of unemployment. We argue that unemployment has different implications for different educational groups on future employment career depending on institutional settings in the UK and Germany. While search and matching models...