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Long-run Expectations of Households

The rational expectations assumption, e.g. in life-cycle models and portfolio-choice models, prescribes that all actions are in line with a well-structured and unbiased system of expectations. In reality, justification and identification of expectations are nontrivial, and we lack empirical evidence especially for the long run. This paper starts to fill this gap and elicits short-run and long-run expectations ...

Top of the Class: The Importance of Ordinal Rank

This article establishes a new fact about educational production: ordinal academic rank during primary school has lasting impacts on secondary school achievement that are independent of underlying ability. Using data on the universe of English school students, we exploit naturally occurring differences in achievement distributions across primary school classes to estimate the impact of class rank. ...

Neighbourhood Turnover and Teenage Attainment

Theories about neighbours’ influence on children's education that are based on social capital, cohesion, and disorganisation stress the importance of neighbourhood stability. This is because stability is regarded as necessary for building strong ties and friendships, which in turn affect educational outcomes. However, amongst the vast number of studies on the effect of neighbours on a child's education, ...

Deutschland: ein Land der Mieter? Die Rolle von Erwartungen über zukünftige Immobilienpreisentwicklungen

Mehr als die Hälfte aller Haushalte in Deutschland wohnen zur Miete – ein im internationalen Vergleich sehr hoher Wert. Bisherige Studien haben vor allen Dingen den regulatorischen Rahmen des Immobilienmarkts hervorgehoben, der Mietwohnungen in Deutschland systematisch begünstigt. Allerdings gibt es keine Studien, die diese Erklärungen empirisch eindeutig untermauern können: einige Arbeiten betonen ...

Home Broadband and Human Capital Formation

This paper estimates the effect of home high-speed internet on national test scores of students at age 14. We combine comprehensive information on the telecom network, administrative student records, house prices and local amenities in England in a fuzzy spatial regression discontinuity design across invisible telephone exchange catchment areas. Using this strategy, we find that increasing broadband ...

Tuition Fees and Educational Attainment

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 ...

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

This paper presents a life-cycle model with human capital investment during working life through training and provides a novel empirical test of human capital theory. We exploit a sizable pension reform across adjacent cohorts in a regression discontinuity setting and find that an increase in working life increases training. We discuss and test further predictions regarding the relation between initial ...

Information Provision and Postgraduate Studies

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

Immigration and the Evolution of Local Cultural Norms

We study the local evolution of cultural norms in West Germany in reaction to the sudden presence of East Germans who migrated to the West after reunification. These migrants grew up with very high rates of maternal employment, whereas West German families followed the traditional breadwinner-housewife model. We find that West German women increase their labor supply and that this holds within household. ...

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