We exploit a novel survey of recently arrived asylum seekers in Germany in order to estimate the degree of intergenerational mobility in education among refugees and compare it to the educational mobility of similar-aged individuals in their region of origin. The findings show that the refugees...

We investigate the achievement impact of alternative uses of student assessments. Our dataset covers over 2 million students in 59 countries observed over 6 waves in the international PISA test 2000-2015. Our empirical model exploits the country panel dimension to investigate assessment reforms...

Does a high regional concentration of immigrants of the same ethnicity affect immigrant children's acquisition of host-country language skills and educational attainment? We exploit the exogenous placement of guest workers from five ethnicities across German regions during the 1960s and 1970s in...

To study how information about educational inequality affects public concerns and policy preferences, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of the German population. Providing information about the extent of educational inequality strongly increases concerns about educational...

How far is the world away from ensuring that every child obtains the basic skills needed to be internationally competitive? And what would accomplishing this mean for world development? Based on the micro data of international and regional achievement tests, we map achievement onto a common...

Patience and risk-taking - two cultural traits that steer intertemporal decision-making - are fundamental to human capital investment decisions. To understand how they contribute to international differences in student achievement, we combine PISA tests with the Global Preference Survey. We find...

This paper studies the evolution of three higher education wage differentials from 1996 to 2019 in Germany, a period when significant changes in the educational composition of the workforce took place. Based on regression analysis and samples of male and female workers from the Socio-Economic...

Learning at school and university and also at the work place has become more important in the knowledge-based economy. This paper provides a critical review of recent econometric work on the determinants and impacts of training in Europe. Training has non negligible positive effects for firms...

Decisions to invest in human capital depend on people’s time preferences. We show that differences in patience are closely related to substantial subnational differences in educational achievement, leading to new perspectives on longstanding within-country disparities. We use social-media data...