Over the 2000s, many federal states in Germany shortened the duration of secondary school by one year while keeping the curriculum unchanged. Exploiting quasi-experimental variation due to the staggered introduction of this reform allows me to identify the causal effect of increased learning...

Over the 2000s, many federal states in Germany shortened the duration of secondary school by one year while keeping the curriculum unchanged. Exploiting quasi-experimental variation due to the staggered introduction of this reform allows me to identify the causal effect of increased learning...

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 investigate how preferences over both the financing and the provision of redistributive policies are affected by immigration and poverty. We find that information about immigration has a negative impact on demanded redistributive taxation among middle income respondents and a positive one...

In a survey experiment conducted in Germany, we investigate how preferences over both the financing and the provision of redistributive policies are affected by poverty and immigration. We find that while information about poverty has no detectable impact on the progressivity of the respondents'...

The issue of income disparity has long plagued South Africa because of the political environment that existed before the country's 1994 democratic transition. Based on the widely used Gini index, which gauges global inequality, the nation routinely has some of the highest rates of income...

Despite success in reducing poverty over the last twenty years, inequality in Chile has remained virtually unchanged, making Chile one of the least equal countries in the world. High levels of inequality have been shown to hamper further reductions in poverty as well as economic growth, and...

Real time information feedback combined with various pricing schemes has been found to reduce residential energy consumption more than information and pricing policies alone. I examine the effect of information provision with bi-monthly, monthly, and real time pricing with in-home displays with...

Increasing individual working lives to counter population ageing and public pension deficits is of utmost interest to policy makers today. Because over 70 percent of older individuals live in a couple, it is relevant to investigate spouses' retirement strategies. Earlier literature in this area...

Several studies show that young women start with lower wage expectations than men, even before entering the labor market and that this partly translates into the actual gender wage gap through effects on educational choice and the formation of reservation wages. Building on the theoretical...