Topic Education

Socio-Economic and Regional Inequalities in Early Care and Education: Consequences for Mothers’ Work-Family Life and Children’s Educational Opportunities

How Does Education Improve Cognitive Skills? Instructional Time versus Timing of Instruction

This paper investigates two mechanisms through which education may affect cognitive skills in adolescence, exploiting a school reform carried out at the state level in Germany as a quasi-natural experiment to identify causal effects: between 2001 and 2007, years at academic-track high school were reduced by one, leaving the overall curriculum unchanged. First, I exploit the variation over time and ...

A Comparison of Intergenerational Mobility Curves in Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the US

We examine intergenerational mobility differences between Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the US. Using ranks, we find that the US is substantially less intergenerationally mobile than the three European countries and that the most mobile region of the US is less mobile than the least mobile regions of Norway and Sweden. Using a linear estimator of income share mobility, we find that the four countries ...

Essays on the Impact of Education and Family Policies on the Formation of Human Capital

Biased by Success and Failure: How Unemployment Shapes Stated Locus of Control

Due to its extraordinary explanatory power for individual behavior, the interest in the concept of locus of control (LOC) has increased substantially within applied economic research. But, even though LOC has been found to affect economic behavior in many ways, the reliability of these findings is at risk as they commonly rely on the assumption that LOC is stable over the life course. While absolute ...

Children from Migrant Backgrounds: Who Are Their Kita Peers?

In Germany, attendance in early childhood education and care (ECEC) centers has soared in the last twenty years, making them a key context in which children learn. For children from migrant backgrounds who speak a foreign language at home, participation in ECEC has the potential of providing them with early German language exposure. One important but often overlooked factor in this respect is the composition ...

Financial Literacy Promotes Financial Inclusion in Both Poor and Rich Countries

For social and economic reasons, national economies benefit from the inclusion of as many people as possible in financial services. In a cross country study, the present study shows that financial literacy for the general population promotes financial inclusion. This relationship goes beyond the effect of higher economic or financial development. And the effect of higher levels of financial literacy ...

Information Asymmetries between Parents and Educators in German Childcare Institutions

Economic theory predicts market failure in the market for early childhood education and care (ECEC) due to information asymmetries. We empirically investigate information asymmetries between parents and ECEC professionals in Germany, making use of a unique extension of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). It allows us to compare quality perceptions by parents and pedagogic staff of 734 ECEC ...

Day Care Centers: Family Expenditures Increased Significantly at Some Points between 1996 and 2015

Private household expenditures on child care in centers have significantly risen: from an average of 98 euros per month in 2005 to just under 171 euros in 2015 for a child under three and for children three and older (“Kindergarten”1 age group), from 71 to 97 euros in the period between 1996 and 2015. At the same time, more and more households are completely exempt from paying fees for day care. However, ...

Does Quality of Early Childhood Education and Care Affect the Home Learning Environment of Children?

Both, a high quality of the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) setting and a high quality of the home learning environment foster children’s development. However, we know little about the interactions between ECEC quality and the home learning environment. We examine whether the child’s attendance in a high ECEC quality setting improves the quality of her home learning environment. We use very ...