This volume was prepared by Marc Piopiunik while he has been working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in June 2011 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes four self-contained empirical studies. All studies aim at...

Während Haupt- und Realschüler vor der bayerischen Schulreform bis zum Ende der sechsten Klasse gemeinsam gelernt haben, werden sie seither bereits nach der vierten Klasse getrennt. Eine aktuelle Studie des ifo Instituts hat die Auswirkungen dieser Reform auf die Schülerkompetenzen anhand von...

To investigate the effects of reducing the intensity of tracking, this study exploits reforms across German states which combined the two lower secondary school tracks, sometimes additionally offering the possibility to acquire a university entrance qualification. Using a...

This paper is the first to estimate a causal effect of immigrant students' reading performance on their math performance. To overcome endogeneity issues due to unobserved ability, we apply an IV approach exploiting variation in age-at-arrival and the linguistic distance between origin and...

Differences in teacher quality are commonly cited as a key determinant of the huge international student performance gaps. However, convincing evidence on this relationship is still lacking, in part because it is unclear how to measure teacher quality consistently across countries. We use unique...

How do alternative job opportunities affect teacher quality? We provide causal evidence on this question by exploiting business cycle conditions at career start as a source of exogenous variation in the outside options of potential teachers. Unlike prior research, we directly assess teacher...