Topic Education

Moving to an Earnings-Related Parental Leave System: Do Heterogeneous Effects on Parents Make Some Children Worse Off?

Can moving to an earnings-related parental leave system influence children’s wellbeing and are heterogeneous effects on parents carried over to the entire family, making special groups of children worse off than others? To answer this question, this study exploits a large and unanticipated parental leave reform in Germany as a natural experiment. By replacing a means-tested by an earnings-related system ...

Childhood Roots of Financial Literacy

Financial literacy predicts informed financial decisions, but what explains financial literacy? We use the concept of financial socialization and aim to represent three major agents of financial socialization: family, school and work. Thus we compile twelve relevant childhood characteristics in a new survey study and examine their relation to financial literacy, while controlling for established socio-demographic ...

Increasing Father Involvement in Child Care: What Do We Know about Effects on Child Development?

The time fathers spend and the activities they perform with children have risen continuously in most Western countries. Increasing father involvement in child care has also been an explicit policy objective with many European countries implementing individual parental leave entitlements for fathers. Whereas these policies mainly aimed at facilitating reconciliation of market work and family care and ...

Mozart or Pelé? The Effects of Teenagers' Participation in Music and Sports

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, this paper analyses the effects of spending part of adolescents’ leisure time on playing music or doing sports, or both. We find that while playing music fosters educational outcomes compared to doing sports, particularly so for girls and children from more highly educated families, doing sports improves subjective health. For educational outcomes, doing ...

Intergenerational Downward Mobility in Educational Attainment and Occupational Careers in West Germany in the Twentieth Century

What happens in the occupational careers of men if the intergenerational continuity in status reproduction is disrupted by the failure to reproduce the parental level of educational attainment? We frame this failure as a risk for intergenerational status maintenance and ask whether such a risk induces extra effort by way of compensation. By studying eight birth cohorts born between 1919 and 1971 characterized ...

G8 High School Reform Results in Higher Grade Repetition Rates and Lower Graduate Age, but Does Not Affect Graduation Rates

The G8 high school reform to reduce the total number of years spent at Gymnasium (Germany’s academic-track secondary school) has been more controversial than almost any other education reform in recent years. Although there are few reliable empirical findings on the effects of the G8 reform, several federal states are already considering a return to the old system, which required 13 years — rather ...

Germany’s G8 High School Reform Has No Impact on Graduation Rates: Six Questions to Mathias Huebener

Three Essays on Communication in Signalling Games: Dissertation

Diese Dissertation befasst sich mit verschiedenen ökonomischen Anwendungen von Signalspielen. In dieser Art von Spielen übermittelt ein Sender einem Empfänger Information, die dieser interpretiert. Bildungsinstitutionen - Sender - bewerten Studenten nach einem festgelegten Notensystem. Die vollständige Offenlegung von Information ist die beste Strategie von Institutionen, wenn Studenten ihren erwarteten ...

Apprenticeship, Vocational Training and Early Labor Market Outcomes - in East and West Germany

We study the returns to apprenticeship and vocational training for three early labor market outcomes all measured at age 25 for East and West German youths: non-employment (i.e., unemployment or out of the labor force), permanent fulltime employment, and wages. We find strong positive effects of apprenticeship and vocational training. There are no significant differences for different types of vocational ...

Pass/Fail, A-F, or 0-100? - Optimal Grading of Eager Students

This paper analyzes optimal grading in a world that focuses on top grades. Students choose an effort level, their performance is graded, and their grade correlates with their future income. Ex-ante, the policy maker chooses the optimal coarseness of the grading scale to maximize student welfare. When choosing their effort, students overweight outstanding { or salient { grades. I show that this behavior ...