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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 ...

Social Media and Allyship in the Black Lives Matter Movement

Information, preferences, and household demand for school value-added

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 ...

Economic Insights: Transfer and Capacity Building

The INSIGHTS project  aims to support and promote the communication of research and to contribute to its transfer to the public. INSIGHTS is funded by the Leibniz Gemeinschaft. INSIGHTS has two main pillars, a platform of exchange between researchers, policymakers, the media, and the public, and the provision of professional guidance and formal training on how to interact with the public and...

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

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 ...

The Length of Schooling and the Timing of Family Formation

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 ...

Informing Students about College: Increasing Enrollment Using a Behavioral Intervention?

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 ...