Though the use of tracking policies to stratify students is commonplace, evi- dence concerning the effects of ability-based tracking on student performance is mixed. Using rich data from the Hungarian secondary school centralized assignment mechanism and a quasi-experimental framework, we find...

Schulschließungen sind Teil der Maßnahmen zur Bekämpfung der COVID-19-Pandemie. Durch die Einschränkung sozialer Kontakte leisten sie einen Beitrag zur Eindämmung von Infektionsketten. Schulschließungen haben jedoch, insbesondere wenn sie länger dauern, signifikante Nebenwirkungen. Diese...

School closures are one of the measures taken to combat COVID-19. By restricting social contact, closures contribute to the containment of infection chains. However, such measures have side effects that directly affect learners, since the loss of instruction time may lead to a reduction in...

Although universal childcare has become an essential tool to support child development, few economic studies analyze its effects on non-cognitive skills and little is known about causal effects on these skills in the long run. In this paper we go beyond short run analyses and examine the long...

We present evidence that the practice of holding back poorly performing students affects estimates of the impact of class size on student outcomes based on within-school variation of cohort size over time. This type of variation is commonly used to identify class size effects. We build a...

Weltweit wird die Wehrpflicht in etwa 60 Ländern praktiziert (CIA's World Factbook 2017). Die Dauer des Wehrdienstes, definiert als die Ausübung eines gesetzlich verpflichtenden Dienstes in den Streitkräften eines Staates, variiert je nach Land und beträgt in den meisten europäischen...

Most school systems grant teachers and school principals considerable discretion in grade retention decisions. This paper argues that schools can exploit this discretion by selectively retaining students to reduce class size which potentially has important implications for public spending on...

We show that in school systems with grade retention or redshirting, birth cohort size is negatively related to the grade-level share of students who are too old for their grade. This compositional effect gives rise to an upward bias in estimates of class size effects based on commonly used...

This paper studies responses to high-stakes incentives arising from early ability tracking. We use three complementary research designs exploiting differences in school track admission rules at the end of primary school in Germany's early ability tracking system. Our results show that the need...

This paper studies responses to high-stakes incentives arising from early ability tracking. We use three complementary research designs exploiting differences in school track admission rules at the end of primary school in Germany's early ability tracking system. Our results show that the need...