There have been many studies estimating the causal effect of an additional year of education on earnings. The majority employ administrative changes in the minimum school leaving age as the mechanism allowing identification. Here we survey 66 such estimates. However, remarkably, while the...

The paper investigates the short-run job mobility of educationally mismatched workers, examining the validity of the Sicherman-Galor hypothesis, which predicts that overeducation is a temporary condition from a worker's perspective associated with higher upward occupational and wage mobility....

Katharina Wedel prepared this study while she was working at the Center for the Economics of Education at the ifo Institute. The study was completed in September 2023 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at LMU Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical essays that...

We study the evolution of monetary returns to high school education and their heterogeneity after the labor market entry using linked survey and administrative labor market data from Germany. By exploiting academic track school openings for cohorts from 1950–1985, we find sizeable monetary...