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 ...
The German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), the German Center for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW), the Leibniz Education Research Network (LERN), and the College for Interdisciplinary Educational Research (CIDER) are delighted to invite you to the CIDER-LERN Conference 2021. The conference will bring together scholars from various disciplines to discuss findings as ...
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. ...
Children with lower socioeconomic status (SES) tend to benefit more from early child care, but are substantially less likely to be enrolled. We study whether reducing behavioral barriers in the application process increases enrollment in child care for lower-SES children. In our RCT in Germany with highly subsidized child care (n > 600), treated families receive application information and personal ...
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 ...
Individuals typically traverse several life phases before forming a family. We analyze whether changing the duration of one of these phases, the education phase, affects the timing of marriage and childbearing. For this purpose, we exploit the introduction of short school years (SSYs) in Germany in 1966–1967, which compressed the education phase without affecting the curriculum. Based on difference-in-differences ...
This study sheds light on whether the provision of information on costs, financing options, and returns of college education results in higher application and college enrollment rates. Based on a behavioral intervention with more than 1,000 high school students in Germany, we provide evidence that the provision of such information increases college application and enrollment rates, in particular for ...