Topic Education

Negative labor supply shock and firms (joint with Peter Haan, Johannes Geyer, Jan Nimczik)

Part I: Lars Felder, "Negative labor supply shock and firms" (Joint with Peter Haan, Johannes Geyer, Jan Nimczik) In times of an increasing scarcity of workers, Germany has in a rare move decreased the retirement age for a sizeable section of the working force. This paper investigates the effect of this negative labor supply shock on firm and individual level outcomes using matched employer...

Long-Term Gains of Graduating in a Recession for Low Educated Entrants

Economic conditions at time of labor market entry have been shown to have large negative effects on labor market outcomes for an extended period of time. The immediate effects have been shown to be worse for lower educated entrants. In the long run, the effects may be very different as low and high educated have different possibilities to accommodate this negative shock, high educated entrants can...

Geographic Labor Mobility and Statutory Minimum Wages

I exploit the German statutory minimum wage introduction in 2015 to estimate its effects on geographic labor mobility using a 2% sample of administrative data. I find an increase in out-migration due to the minimum wage of low-skilled workers with migrant background from counties where a high-share of workers is subject to the minimum wage to urban labor market regions. The increase in out...

Berlin Macro Seminar

Birth Cohort Size Variation and the Estimation of Class Size Effects

We show that in school systems with grade retention or redshirting birth cohort size is negatively related to the grade-level share of students who are too old for their grade. This compositional effect gives rise to an upward bias in estimates of class size effects based on commonly used research designs exploiting within-school variation in birth cohort size. Using data for all primary schools in ...

Age and Cognitive Skills: Use It or Lose It

Cross-sectional age-skill profiles suggest that cognitive skills start declining by age 30 if not earlier. If accurate, such age-driven skill losses pose a major threat to the human capital of societies with rapidly aging populations. We estimate actual age-skill profiles from individual changes in literacy and numeracy skills at different ages. We use the unique German longitudinal component of the ...

Cross-national Differences in Socioeconomic Achievement Inequality in Early Primary School: The Role of Parental Education and Income in Six Countries

This paper presents comparative information on the strength of the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and literacy skills at ages 6–8, drawing on data from France, Germany, Japan, Rotterdam (Netherlands), the United Kingdom, and the United States. We investigate whether the strength of the association between SES and literacy skills in early-to-mid childhood depends on the operationalization ...

Thanks, but No Thanks: A Microsimulation of BAföG Eligibility and Non-Take-Up

While the body of literature on the non-take-up of public aid has grown substantially in recent years, a notable gap remains in the literature of non-take-up rates for student aid programs, where research is still extremely limited. This paper examines the non-take-up rate of Germany’s federal student aid program BAföG by creating a microsimulation based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel ...

Crowded-out? Changes in Informal Childcare during the Expansion of Formal Services in Germany

Informal childcare care by grandparents, other relatives or friends is an important source of support in many Western countries, including Germany. Yet the role of this type of care is often overlooked in accounts of social policies supporting families with children, which tend to focus on formal childcare. This article examines whether the large formal childcare expansion occurring in Germany in the ...

Mortality Inequality in Chile

This paper analyses trends in mortality inequality in 330 Chilean communes from 1990 to 2010 for different age groups and both genders. Chile had substantial inequalities in local-level mortality rates in 1990 but by 2010 these disparities had significantly decreased, especially among infants, children and the elderly. The only exception was Chilean men aged 20–39, for whom inequality in mortality ...