This paper examines the macroeconomic effects of an environmental tax reform in a growing economy. A model of endogenous growth based on human capital accumulation is used to numerically simulate the growth effects of different environmental tax reforms and compute their impact on welfare in the...

This paper investigates how post-school education decisions are affected by a one-year reduction of secondary school duration with an unchanged curriculum. Until recently, Germany had had a longstanding tradition of 13 years of schooling in preparation for university. During the last decade,...

This paper presents evidence from a natural-experiment which evaluates the effectiveness of a student mentoring program. The mentoring includes several compulsory, scheduled, faceto- face appointments between a mentor and a student in the first study year. All mentors are graduated and employed...

In the late 1980s privatization and down-sizing of nationalized steel mills and related firms in the metal industry have lead to large-scale redundancy plans. A special Steel Foundation was created as part of a social plan. This foundation acted like an independent training center, where...

Educational integration of children with migration background is an important issue in the social sciences. Few studies exist that quantify the disadvantage of immigrant children in education and there has not been any attempt to identify institutional conditions of the education system that...

Diese Arbeit untersucht Unterschiede in den Schulleistungen zwischen Jungen und Maedchen sowie moegliche Ursachen, die sich aus Charakteristika der Eltern und institutionellen Rahmenbedingungen ergeben. Hierzu werden die Daten der Schulleistungsstudie PISA 2000 mit einer Drei-Ebenenanalyse...

A large number of econometric studies have examined the impact of central exit examinations on student attainment and repeatedly found a positive effect. This paper contributes to clarify the term central exit examination by distinguishing between central assignment and central grading. For this...

Using PIRLS 2001 and PISA 2003 data for Germany, this paper examines whether secondgeneration immigrants and girls are graded worse in math than comparable natives and boys, respectively. Once all grading-relevant characteristics, namely math skills and oral participation, are accounted for,...

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...