How does the financial aid allocation mechanism affect student behavior? We provide a framework for quantifying the impact of financial aid on student debt, academic capital, and labor market outcomes. We specify and estimate a dynamic discrete choice model of simultaneous education, work, and...

Child care and education are important inputs in the human capital production function. The research of Nobel prize winner James Heckman shows that skills are built from the early childhood on and increase the returns of later educational inputs, in short: skill begets skill. Therefore, it is...

This volume was prepared by Constantin Mang while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in 2014 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes a short introduction and four self-contained chapters that focus on ICT...

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Siegler while working at the Center for the Economics of Education of the Ifo Institute. It was completed in June 2014 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich (LMU) in November 2014. The thesis includes...

A key challenge in developing countries interested in providing early childhood development programs at scale is whether these programs can be effectively delivered through existing public service infrastructures. We present the results of a randomized experiment evaluating the effects of a...

We explore responses of Australian school principals to the introduction of test score reporting via the My School website in 2010. Our analysis is motivated by the implicit assumption that heightened public scrutiny should motivate principals to align schools' policies and practices with what...

This paper investigates the relationship between government education expenditure and regional innovation, a key engine of China’s long-term economic growth as the nation undergoes massive economic restructuring and deep transformations. In an attempt to inform a whole-of-government approach...

This paper studies the impact of a lottery-based desegregation program that allows minority students to transfer to seven school districts serving higher-income, predominantly-white families. While prior research has studied the impacts of such a program receiving students, this paper studies...

We use administrative panel data on about a quarter of a million students in the German state of Hesse to estimate the causal effect of class size on school tracking outcomes after elementary school. Our identification strategy relies on the quasi-random assignment of students to different class...