Topic Education

Local Unemployment and Postsecondary Education

This study uses administrative data on the universe of students in tertiary education in Germany and shows that university enrollment depends negatively on the local unemployment rate at high school graduation. This finding contradicts common evidence on countercyclical US undergraduate enrollment. Students' financial dependency and loan aversion suggest reduced parental income as dominant...

Tuition Fees and Educational Attainment

Following a landmark court ruling in 2005, more than half of Germany’s universities started charging tuition fees, which were later abolished in a staggered manner. We exploit the fact that even students who were already enrolled had to start paying fees. We show that fees increase study effort and degree completion among these students. However, fees also decrease first-time university enrollment ...

Gender Gaps in Early Wage Expectations

Using detailed data from a unique survey of high school graduates in Germany, we document a gender gap in expected full-time earnings of more than 15%. We decompose this early gender gap and find that especially differences in coefficients help explain different expectations. In particular, the effects of having time for family as career motive and being first-generation college student are associated ...

Working Life and Human Capital Investment: Causal Evidence from a Pension Reform

Class Rank and Long-Run Outcomes

This paper considers an unavoidable feature of the school environment, class rank. What are the long-run effects of a student's ordinal rank in elementary school? Using administrative data on all public-school students in Texas, we show that students with a higher third-grade academic rank, conditional on achievement and classroom fixed effects, have higher subsequent test scores, are more likely to ...

The Gender Division of Unpaid Care Work throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic in Germany

The COVID-19 pandemic and related closures of day care centres and schools significantly increased the amount of care work done by parents. There has been much speculation over whether the pandemic increased or decreased gender equality in parental care work. Based on representative data for Germany from spring 2020 and winter 2021 we present an empirical analysis that shows that although gender inequality ...

Centre-Based Care and Parenting Activities

We examine the relationship between parenting activities and centre-based care using time diary and survey data for mothers in Germany. While mothers using centre-based care spend significantly less time in the presence of their child, we find that differences in the time spent on specific activities such as reading, talking, and playing with the child are relatively small or zero. The pattern of results ...

Heterogeneous Effects of After-School Care on Child Development

It is often argued that institutionalized after-school care (ASC) can benefit children lacking adequate homework support at home and, hence, foster equality of opportunity. However, despite considerable policy interest, it is unclear whether these afternoon programs are beneficial for child development and if selection into them is efficient, i.e., whether students benefiting most from the programs ...

From Low Emission Zone to Academic Track: Environmental Policy Effects on Educational Achievement in Elementary School

Information Provision and Postgraduate Studies

This is the first paper to examine experimentally effects of information provision on beliefs about pecuniary and non-pecuniary returns of postgraduate education, enrolment intentions and realized enrolment. We find that our treatment causally affects beliefs measured six months after treatment. The effects on beliefs differ by gender and academic background, and we find that stated enrolment intentions ...