Educational large-scale studies typically adopt highly standardized settings to collect cognitive data on large samples of respondents. Increasing costs alongside dwindling response rates in these studies necessitate exploring alternative assessment strategies such as unsupervised web-based testing. Before respective assessment modes can be implemented on a broad scale, their impact on cognitive measurements ...
This paper examines whether biased income expectations due to overconfidence lead to higher levels of debt-taking. In a lab experiment, participants can purchase goods by borrowing against their future income. We exogenously manipulate income expectations by letting income depend on relative performance in hard and easy quiz tasks. We successfully generate biased income expectations and show that participants ...
While financial inclusion is typically addressed by improving the financial infrastructure, we show that a higher degree of financial literacy also has a clear beneficial effect. We study this effect at the cross-country level, which allows us to consider institutional variation. Regarding “access to finance”, financial infrastructure and financial literacy are mainly substitutes. However, regarding ...
Following a landmark ruling by the Constitutional Court in 2005, more than half of Germany’s universities started charging tuition fees, which also applied to incumbent students. We exploit this unusual lack of grandfathering together with register data covering the universe of students to show that tuition fees increased degree completion among incumbent students. Investigating mechanisms, we do not ...
While several studies suggest that stress-related mental health problems among school children are related to specific elements of schooling, empirical evidence on this causal relationship is scarce. We examine a German schooling reform that increased weekly instruction time and study its effects on stress-related outpatient diagnoses from the universe of health claims data of the German Social Health ...
This paper analyzes whether education has a protective effect on mental health. To estimate causal effects, we employ an instrumental variable (IV) technique that exploits a reform extending compulsory schooling by one year implemented between 1949 and 1969 in West Germany. We complement analyses on the Mental Component Summary (MCS) score as a generic measure of overall mental health with an MCS-based ...
This study estimates mean and distributional effects of early between-school ability tracking on student achievement. For identification, I exploit heterogeneity in tracking regimes between German federal states. After comprehensive primary school, about 40% of students are selected for the academic track and taught in separate schools in all states. The remaining students, however, are either...
We present evidence that the practice of holding back poorly performing students affects estimates of the impact of class size on student outcomes based on within-school variation of cohort size over time. This type of variation is commonly used to identify class size effects. We build a theoretical model in which cohort size is subject to random shocks and students whose performance falls below a ...
(together with C. Katharina Spieß and Sevrin Waights) We examine the impact of day care usage on parenting activities. We measure parenting activities as the amount of time that parents spend on child rearing and, in particular, on educational activities with children. Using time-use data and panel data of a household survey, we estimate the effects at the extensive (use vs. non-use)...
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