Over the last year the German government has introduced a comprehensive set of labor market policy reforms, the so-called Hartz reforms, which aim at a significant reduction of unemployment. To this end, (a) many of the existing instruments of active labor market policy are modified...

The publication of the OECD report on the PISA 2000 study induced a public outcry in Germany. On average, German students participating in this standardized test performed considerably below the OECD average and substantially worse than those of other European countries, like Finland or Ireland....

This paper investigates whether and to what extent employment policy measures (co-) financed by the European Social Fund in Germany meet their objective. Specifically, it is analyzed whether qualification programs for employed workers in the German state of Saxony were effective in terms of...

This paper investigates whether and to what extent immigrants in Germany are integrated into German society by utilizing a variety of qualitative information and subjective data collected in the 1999 wave of the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). To this end, leisure-time activities and...

The majority of empirical papers in the literature on school quality finds no or only small effects of class size and other school quality measures on students' outcomes. This paper analyses the effect of achievement heterogeneity and therefore the effect of the composition rather than the pure...

The German practice of compelling weak students to repeat a class has come under heavy criticism recently. Many observers fear that this practice is, at best, useless or even counterproductive. However, little is known so far on the consequences of having to repeat a class, as compared to be...

Determining the optimal age at which a child should enter school is a controversial topic in education policy. In particular, German policy makers, pedagogues, parents, and teachers have since long discussed whether the traditional, established age of school entry at 6 years remains appropriate....

This paper provides a preliminary assessment of recent reforms of German employment promotion policy. While several recent studies analyze the impact of measures of employment promotion for the case of Germany, no comparable study exists on the aggregate level, thus precluding any assessment of...

Assessing the migration potential and predicting future migration streams are among the most relevant, yet least well understood topics of migration research. The usual approach taken to address aggregate-level prediction problems is to fit ad hoc specifications to historical data, and to...

This paper provides a snapshot of the stock of immigrants in Germany using the 1995 wave of the Microzensus with a particular emphasis on distinguishing first- and second-generation migrants. On the basis of this portrait, we draw attention to the empirically most relevant groups of immigrants...