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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 ...

Patience and the North-South Divide in Student Achievement in Italy and the United States

Herkunftsspezifische Unterschiede im Privatschulbesuch: Wie viel erklärt die geografische Verteilung privater Schulangebote?

In Deutschland ist die Zahl der Privatschulen seit 1992 erheblich gestiegen, insbesondere in Ostdeutschland. Diese Schulen werden überwiegend von SchülerInnen aus sozioökonomisch privilegierten Haushalten besucht, während Kinder aus einkommensschwachen Familien seltener vertreten sind. In diesem Beitrag untersuchen wir, ob die räumliche Verteilung der Privatschulen mit sozialen Ungleichheiten beim ...

Does Family Structure Account for Child Achievement Gaps by Parental Education? Findings for England, France, Germany and the United States

This paper explores the role of family trajectories during childhood in explaining inequalities by maternal education in children's math and reading skills using harmonized, longitudinal, and nationally representative surveys, which follow children over the course of primary and lower secondary school in four high-income countries (England, France, Germany, and the United States). As single parenthood ...

Closing the Gaps? The Impact of Student Aid Eligibility on Application Behavior to Higher Education

This study examines how conditional aid eligibility influences students’ application behaviors using extensive data from the French national application platform, Admission Post Bac (APB). Employing a generalized difference-in differences approach, we analyze the impact of an exogenous change in the income threshold for financial aid eligibility. Our primary focus is on high-achieving students, a...

Age-specific Effects of Early Daycare on Children's Health

Over the past decades, the share of very young children in daycare has increased significantly in many OECD countries, including Germany. Despite the relevance of child health for child development and later life success, the effect of early daycare attendance on health has received little attention in the economic literature. In this study, I investigate the impact of a large daycare expansion in...

The Implications of Pupil Rank for Achievement

The significance of social interaction has become an increasingly important part of economic thought and models through the work on peer effects, social norms, and networks. Within this literature, a novel focus of ranking within groups has emerged. The rank of an individual is usually defined as the ordinal position within a specific group. This could be the work environment or a classroom, and much ...

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 ...

Trajectories of School Absences across Compulsory Schooling and Their Impact on Children’s Academic Achievement: An Analysis Based on Linked Longitudinal Survey and School Administrative Data

Prior research has identified that school absences harm children’s academic achievement. However, this literature is focused on brief periods or single school years and does not consistently account for the dynamic nature of absences across multiple school years. This study examined dynamic trajectories of children’s authorised and unauthorised absences throughout their compulsory school career in ...

The Youth Mental Health Crisis during the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Role of School Closures