This paper provides new estimates of the medium and long-term impacts of Head Start on the health and behavioral problems of its participants. We identify these impacts using discontinuities in the probability of participation induced by program eligibility rules. Our strategy allows us to...

Interventions targeting early childhood development, such as investment in preschools, are often seen as promising mechanisms to increase human capital and to reduce the intergenerational transmission of poverty and inequality. This paper presents results from a randomized evaluation of a large...

In this paper we investigate the effects of emigration on growth in developing countries.We present a model in which productivity increases either through imitation or innovation, and both activities use the same types of human capital as inputs, albeit with different intensities.Heterogenous...

Das Bundesverfassungsgericht entschied im Jahr 2005, dass es jedem Bundesland frei stehe, zu entscheiden, ob es Studiengebühren erheben möchte. Infolge dessen führten zunächst Nordrhein-Westfalen und Niedersachsen ab dem Wintersemester 2006/2007 Studiengebühren ein. Ein Jahr später folgten...

In this paper, I document evidence that intergovernmental incentives inherent in public sector defined benefit pension systems distort the amount and timing of income for public school teachers. This intergovernmental incentive stems from the fact that, in many states, local school districts are...

This paper provides an `escape route' from the efficiency-equity trade-off in the School Choice problem. We achieve our objective by presenting a weak notion of fairness, called τ-fairness, which is always satisfied by some allocation. Then, we propose the adoption of the Student Optimal...

Theory and evidence point towards particularly positive effects of high-quality child care for disadvantaged children. At the same time, disadvantaged families often sort out of existing programs. To counter differences in learning outcomes between children from different socioeconomic...

Outside of apprenticeships, allocations of public funds across vocational education and training (VET) courses are often made on the basis of government forecasts, with limited competition between (mostly public) colleges. This centralised model is often blamed for stifling responsiveness to...

We study whether early tracking of students based on ability increases migrant-native achievement gaps. To eliminate confounding impacts of unobserved country traits, we employ a differences-in-differences strategy that exploits international variation in the age of tracking as well as student...