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Focus and personal energy during study and work are vital in all learning outputs, especially in the covid-19 time that addresses the importance of self-focused behaviour in online learning environments. In this paper, we present a method of gaining insight into previous knowledge of students’ approaches to focusing and managing personal energy during covid-19 online studying environment to overcome stress. ”Manage your energy, not your time” cites a Harvard Business Review study (Schwartz & McCarthy, 2016), explaining that time management is a waste of time; therefore, we should manage our energy instead. Leaders should focus on managing personal energy and surviving in the workplace to manage stress and achieve a balanced career and private life in the long run. Management course students at the School of Economics and Business, University of Ljubljana, can be perceived as future leaders; we collected their opinions. We used content analysis to estimate how stress affects them and how they manage the consequences of stress, particularly procrastination. The problem with procrastination is that our brains are programmed to procrastinate, especially when it comes to new, unknown tasks. Therefore, our mind responds to postponing the task as fear arises with an unknown task. Results are presented, and key identified themes offer implications for managing physical, emotional, and mental energy. Students perform different cardiovascular sports activities to reduce stress and successfully overcome studying goals in the covid-19 environment.

We develop novel measures of early-career skills that are more detailed, comprehensive, and labor-market-relevant than existing skill proxies. We exploit that skill requirements of apprenticeships in Germany are codified in state-approved, nationally standardized apprenticeship plans. These plans provide more than 13,000 different skills and the exact duration of learning each skill. Following workers over their careers in administrative data, we find that cognitive, social, and digital skills acquired during apprenticeship are highly – yet differently – rewarded. We also document rising returns to digital and social skills since the 1990s, with a more moderate increase in returns to cognitive skills.

We study the effects of increased school spending in rural American school districts by leveraging the introduction and subsequent expansion of Wisconsin's Sparsity Aid Program. We find that the program, which provides additional state funding to small and isolated school districts, increased spending in eligible districts by 2% annually and that districts primarily allocated funds to areas with low baseline budget shares. This increased spending has little effect on standardized test scores, but modestly increases college enrollment and completion for students with a low likelihood of attending or completing college.

We present the results of a randomized intervention in schools to study how teaching financial literacy affects risk and time preferences of adolescents. Following more than 600 adolescents, aged 16 years on average, over about half a year, we provide causal evidence that teaching financial literacy has significant short-term and longer-term effects on risk and time preferences. Compared to two different control treatments, we find that teaching financial literacy makes subjects more patient, less present-biased, and slightly more risk-averse. Our finding that the intervention changes economic preferences contributes to a better understanding of why financial literacy has been shown to correlate systematically with financial behavior in previous studies. We argue that the link between financial literacy and field behavior works through economic preferences. In our study, the latter are also related in a meaningful way to students’ field behavior.

We study whether female students benefit from being taught by female professors, and whether such gender match effects differ by class size. We use administrative records of a German public university, covering all programs and courses between 2006 and 2018. We find that gender match effects on student performance are sizable in smaller classes, but do not exist in larger classes. This difference suggests that direct and frequent interactions between students and professors are important for the emergence of gender match effects. Instead, the mere fact that one’s professor is female is not sufficient to increase performance of female students. published

We investigate whether classical studies in high school - that emphasize in Italy the study of ancient languages such as Latin and Greek - affect personality traits. Using Italian survey data, we compare individuals who did classical studies in high school with similar individuals who completed a more scientific academic curriculum. We find that having done classical studies does not affect conscientiousness and openness but increases neuroticism and self-reported unhappiness.

We examine friendships and study partnerships among university students over several years. At the aggregate level, connections increase over time, but homophily on gender and ethnicity is relatively constant across time, university residences, and different network layers. At the individual level, homophilous tendencies are persistent across time and network layers. Furthermore, we see assortativity in homophilous tendencies. There is weaker, albeit significant, homophily over malleable characteristics−risk preferences, altruism, study habits, and so on. We find little evidence of assimilation over those characteristics. We also document the nuanced impact of network connections on changes in Grade Point Average.

We consider long-term impacts of establishing school psychology offices in Norway, which introduced 'maturity testing' to advice parents and school boards on school starting age. In the early reform period, children born close to the normative age cut-off who reached school-starting age after the establishment were more likely to finish compulsory schooling late, and experienced higher earnings as adults. When offices were instead able to block delayed school entry after a legislative change, having an office in operation led to a reduction in the likelihood of late graduation for the youngest children in each cohort, and no long-term benefits.

Studies have shown that a lack of adult supervision of school-aged children is associated with antisocial behavior and poor school performance. To mitigate this, one policy response is to provide structured, adult-supervised programs offered after school throughout the academic year. After-school programs in Norway are an integrated part of school, used to extend the school day to a full working day by providing care before and after school. Participation is voluntary and is subject to fees paid by parents. In the past decade, the quality and content of these programs and the role they can play in integrating children have been under scrutiny. In 2016/17, the city of Oslo gradually introduced and expanded an offer of free part time participation in its after-school program, starting with city districts with a high share of children with an immigrant background. We utilize the staggered roll out of this free after-school program to investigate enrollment, learning outcomes and student wellbeing. The take-up was substantial, raising enrollment rates rates from about 70 to 95% in the first wave of affected schools. However, our difference-in-differences estimates show little overall effect of the program on academic performance, neither on average nor across subgroups. There is also little evidence that the program enhanced student well-being or decreased bullying and we find no evidence of increased maternal labor supply.

We study the effect of school closures and the transition from on-site to on-line teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic in the Finnish upper secondary schools. To identify the effects we exploit variation in the length of school closure periods across schools between autumn 2020 and spring 2021. Using a difference-in-difference design, we show that the students who studied on-line for longer periods performed equally well in the Matriculation exam at the end of upper-secondary education than the students who experienced shorter school closures. Moreover, we show that inequalities across Finnish students from different socioeconomic backgrounds did not exacerbate during this period.

We analyze perceptions of international applicability of one's education and migration aspirations and intentions among university students in Czechia, India, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, and Spain. Students in law perceive their education least internationally applicable. Perceived international applicability strongly predicts migration aspirations and intentions also after controlling for study fields, individual characteristics, and university fixed effects. Furthermore, among those not studying law, hours spent studying are increasing with perceived international applicability of one's education. Our findings are consistent with predictions from a model in which students invest in their education before learning their mobility status. .

In this paper, we examine the wage returns to an extra year of primary school using a policy reform in Egypt, which reduced compulsory primary schooling from 6 to 5 years. Since this policy changed the duration of primary school while providing the same diploma, we can estimate the human capital effects holding the sheepskin effects constant. We find that the wage returns to an extra year of primary school for Egyptian men aged 24–44 is a statistically insignificant 2–4 percent. Despite the low returns for the overall population, the returns are much higher for men born in rural areas and men whose fathers have low levels of education—indicating important human capital effects for underprivileged boys. Consistent with this result, we find that the policy effects of a one-year reduction in primary schooling on schooling attainment at various levels are more adverse for underprivileged boys. Our findings, therefore, suggest that such a policy could be particularly detrimental for students from lower socioeconomic groups—contributing to increased inequality.

Class size reduction mandates are frequent and invariably justified by studies reporting positive effects on student achievement. Yet other studies report no effects, and the literature as a whole awaits correction for potential publication bias. Moreover, if identification drives results systematically, the relevance of individual studies will vary. We build a sample of 1,767 estimates collected from 62 studies and for each estimate codify 42 factors reflecting estimation context. We employ recently developed nonlinear techniques for publication bias correction and Bayesian model averaging techniques that address model uncertainty. The results suggest publication bias among studies featured in top five economics journals, but not elsewhere. The implied class size effect is zero for all identification approaches except Tennessee's Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio project. The effect remains zero for disadvantaged students and across subjects, school types, and countries.

Men have fallen behind women in education in developed countries. Why? I study the impact of a transitory increase in the opportunity cost of schooling on men's and women's educational attainment. I exploit a reform in Iceland that lowered income taxes to zero for one year and compare teenagers above and below the compulsory schooling age. This earnings opportunity increased the dropout rate and led to a permanent loss in years of education for young men, but had no effect on the education of women. Male dropouts suffer substantial losses in lifetime earnings, slow career progression, and reduced marriage and fertility outcomes. The results cannot be explained by negative selection of dropouts or low returns to education but can be reconciled by gender differences in nonpecuniary costs of school attendance, myopia, or perceived returns to education. The findings suggest that due to these gender differences, economic booms misallocate young men away from school, entrenching the gender gap in education.

Books shape how children learn about society and norms, in part through representation of different characters. We introduce new artificial intelligence methods for systematically converting images into data and apply them, along with text analysis methods, to measure the representation of skin color, race, gender, and age in award-winning children's books widely read in homes, classrooms, and libraries over the last century. We find that more characters with darker skin color appear over time, but the most influential books persistently depict characters with lighter skin color, on average, than other books, even after conditioning on race; we also find that children are depicted with lighter skin than adults on average. Relative to their growing share of the U.S. population, Black and Latinx people are underrepresented in these same books, while White males are overrepresented. Over time, females are increasingly present but appear less often in text than in images, suggesting greater symbolic inclusion in pictures than substantive inclusion in stories. We then present analysis of the supply of, and demand for, books with different levels of representation to better understand the economic behavior that may contribute to these patterns. On the demand side, we show that people consume books that center their own identities. On the supply side, we document higher prices for books that center non-dominant social identities and fewer copies of these books in libraries that serve predominantly White communities. Lastly, we show that the types of children's books purchased in a neighborhood are related to local political beliefs.

We present first experimental evidence that relative performance feedback improves both the speed and quality with which challenging long-term tasks are completed. Providing university students with ongoing relative feedback on accumulated course credits accelerates graduation by 0.12 SD, and also improves grades by 0.063 SD. Treatment effects are concentrated among students with medium pre-treatment graduation probabilities: when these students are informed about an above-average performance, their outcomes improve – otherwise their outcomes deteriorate. Combined with survey evidence, this pattern of results suggests that learning about own ability is a plausible mechanism.

Expected earnings matter for college major choices, and majors differ in both their average earnings and the age profile of their earnings. We show that students' family background is strongly related to the earnings paths of the major they choose. Students with more educated parents, especially those who have graduate degrees, choose majors with lower early-career earnings but much faster earnings growth. They are also less likely to choose safe majors with little early-career earnings or unemployment downside. Parental income has a weaker relationship with major choice and operates mostly through the type of institution the student attends.

We estimate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on hidden drop-out, a new measure indicating failure in achieving the minimum level of skills considered to be adequate for a student getting the high school diploma. We exploit the exogenous variation induced by the pandemic by comparing two cohorts of students (one affected and the other unaffected), within the same school. We find that hidden drop-out increases by 8.6 percentage points; the effect is stronger for students with lower levels of prior achievement, from poorer families, but also for those emotionally disrupted during assessments, and for those disclosing lower educational aspirations.

Education is a fundamental human right and it is a global Sustainable Development Goal to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education for all.” Many children with disabilities in low-income countries, however, continue to be excluded from educational opportunities at great cost to themselves, their families, and the communities in which they live. Realizing the right to inclusive education for children with disabilities requires policies and practices that are tailored to and effective for unique regional and local contexts. Using new qualitative data collected in 2020 (based on a desk review and key informant interviews), this chapter explores the inclusiveness, equality, and quality of education for children with disabilities in three African countries: Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, and Niger. The study countries are at the bottom of the Human Development Index ranking of 189 countries worldwide (Ethiopia 173, Burkina Faso 182, Niger 189, data from 2020). Despite state commitments to education as a human right and legislative support for inclusive education in each country, social, economic, political, and financial factors at the family, community, and system levels contribute to the continued marginalization of children with disabilities. The insights from this multi-country analysis highlight the importance of locally informed and context-specific approaches but also point to broader lessons for the study and promotion of inclusive education in low-resource settings. These insights provide a starting point for further investigation of disabilityinclusive education on the African continent and in the developing world.

We evaluate the effects of an online self-assessment tool on teachers' competencies and beliefs about ICT in education. The causal impact of the tool is evaluated through a randomized encouragement design, involving 7,391 lower secondary teachers across 11 European countries. Short-run impact estimates show that the use of the tool led teachers to critically revise their technology-enhanced teaching competencies (-0.14 standard deviations) and their beliefs about ICT in education (-0.35 s.d.), while there is no impact on their probability of taking specific training. The effects are concentrated among teachers in the top-end tail of the distribution of pre-treatment outcomes. We provide suggestive evidence that the feedback score provided by the tool triggered such results by providing a negative information shock.

This paper estimates family spillovers in high school major choice in Sweden, where admission to oversubscribed majors is determined based on GPA. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find large sibling and intergenerational spillovers that depend on the gender mix of a dyad. Same-gender siblings copy one another, while younger brothers recoil from older sister's choices. Fathers and mothers influence sons, but not their daughters, except when a mother majors in the male-dominated program of Engineering. Back of the envelope calculations reveal these within family spillovers have sizable implications for the gender composition of majors.

This paper estimates the effect of a full year of the COVID-19 pandemic on school performance, focusing on students at the end of upper secondary school who are about to enter the labour market or start university without having had the opportunity to recover. Using longitudinal data from standardised tests for the student population nationwide, we use difference-in-differences models to analyse the performance of two cohorts of students in Italy: a cohort that has never been exposed to the pandemic and a cohort that graduated in 2021. We find that the pandemic had a huge negative impact on students' performance in mathematics and reading (approximately 0.4 s.d. in both domains). Low-achieving pupils suffered the most, increasing the gap between strong and poor performers. The relative position of girls improved compared to boys. Different from the findings from the existing literature, inequalities by parental education remained largely unchanged.

We quantify the causal effect of schooling on cognitive skills across 21 countries and the full distribution of working-age individuals. We exploit exogenous variation in educational attainment induced by a broad set of institutional reforms affecting different cohorts of individuals in different countries. We find a positive effect of an additional year of schooling on internationally-comparable numeracy and literacy scores. We show that the effect is substantially homogeneous by gender and socio-economic background and that it is larger for individuals completing a formal qualification rather than dropping out. Results suggest that early and late school years are the most decisive for cognitive skill development. Exploiting unique survey data on the use of skills, we find suggestive evidence that our result is mediated by access to high-skill jobs.

The Covid-19 pandemic caused prolonged school closures worldwide. Children in resource- poor settings were particularly affected given their limited access to remedial distance learning opportunities through the internet, television, and radio. To address the poor access to formal education, we designed an educational intervention consisting of a set of audio lessons that were delivered through mobile phones to primary school students using Interactive Voice Response (IVR). During the 15-week program period, parents could access the lessons for free by calling a designated phone number and listening to a lesson with their child at any time. We delivered the randomized intervention to 1,763 primary school children across 90 villages in Bangladesh during the 2021 Covid-19 school closures. The intervention improved the test scores of children in literacy and numeracy by 0.60 Standard Deviations (SD). Additionally, the intervention led to an increase in the amount of time that parents spent on homeschooling. The intervention was particularly beneficial for academically weaker students, those from the poorest strata, and those with less-educated caregivers. Our results suggest that this scalable and low-cost intervention could be leveraged in similar settings to address learning losses of marginalized students.

New hand-collected school administrative data from 1870s Virginia, alongside linked individual US Census records, reveals that temporary school closures had lasting effects on literacy and income in adulthood. Those affected by the closures had lower intergenerational economic mobility, particularly those from low-income backgrounds. The age at which the closures occurred also played a role with younger cohorts more affected by early developmental disruptions and older cohorts more affected by prolonged closures.

Grade retention offers students a chance to catch up with unmastered material but also leads to less labor-market experience by delaying graduation and labor-market entry. This is the first paper to quantify this trade-off, using an exit exam cutoff of Dutch academic secondary schools, where failing implies grade retention. I find no impact of retaining on final educational attainment, although retained students are later to graduate. Grade retention does lead to annual earnings loss at age 28 of 3000 euro (8.5%) due to reduced labor-market experience. Overall, grade retention is of no benefit for students around the cutoff.

We study peer effects in online training participation using unique data from a large-scale online teacher training program. The platform data allow us to observe the accurate duration of attendance for every individual-lecture pair. We classify peer groups as close peers, local peers, and global peers based on their relationships. By controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, we find positive effects of close and local peer appearance on trainees' joining a lecture and on their length of stay in the lecture. However, global peers generate a negative but economically insignificant impact. Peer effects differ by group and increase with the relationship closeness. Using the survey data, we investigate the mechanisms of peer influences and find that social interactions facilitate online peer effects. Peer pressure and reputation concerns also help explain our findings. Our results shed new light on how peer effects can be utilized to improve the effectiveness of online learning.

We present findings from an evaluation study of the Dual-Teacher program, a computer- assisted instruction program, that makes lecture videos and other teaching resources from an elite urban middle school available through the internet to schools in poor and remote areas in China. The unique design of the study allows us to not just estimate the effect of the program on student performance but distinguish the direct effect coming from students' exposure to the lecture videos in class and the indirect effect due to improved instruction quality of the local teacher who uses the lecture videos in lesson preparation. Using the difference-in-differences method, we find that the Dual-Teacher program improves student performance in math by 0.978 standard deviations over the three-year middle school education, of which 0.343 standard deviations are attributable to the indirect effect. We also find that the positive impacts of the program are cumulative and robust to student and teacher characteristics as well as a plethora of other considerations. From a policy perspective, our findings suggest that the Dual-Teacher program is an effective and low cost means to improve education outcomes in underserved areas and hence help close cross-region gaps in education.

The prevalence of school-based healthcare has increased markedly over the past decade. We study a modern mode of school-based healthcare, telemedicine, that offers the potential to reach places and populations with historically low access to such care. School-based telemedicine clinics (SBTCs) provide students with access to healthcare during the regular school day through private videoconferencing with a healthcare provider. We exploit variation over time in SBTC openings across schools in three rural districts in North Carolina. We find that school-level SBTC access reduces the likelihood that a student is chronically absent by 2.5 percentage points (29 percent) and reduces the number of days absent by about 0.8 days (10 percent). Relatedly, access to an SBTC increases the likelihood of math and reading test-taking by between 1.8-2.0 percentage points (about 2 percent). Heterogeneity analyses suggest that these effects are driven by male students. Finally, we see suggestive evidence that SBTC access reduces violent or weapons-related disciplinary infractions among students but has little influence on other forms of misbehavior.

Growing reliance on student loans and repayment difficulties have raised concerns of a student debt crisis in the United States. However, little is known about the effects of student borrowing on human capital and long-run financial well-being. The authors use variation induced by recent expansions in federal loan limits, together with administrative schooling, earnings, and credit records, to identify the effects of increased student borrowing on credit-constrained students’ educational attainment, earnings, debt, and loan repayment. Increased student loan availability raises student debt and improves degree completion, later-life earnings, and student loan repayment while having no effect on homeownership or other types of debt. Annenberg Institute at Brown University

We examine the effects of the large-scale construction of public universities in Egypt during the 1960s and 1970s. We found that opening a local university increased the likelihood of obtaining higher education degrees and had long-lasting positive effects on labor market and marriage outcomes, particularly for women. We give insights on internal migration as a channel and show that migration prior to university enrollment age decreased while migration after that age increased as an outcome of university construction. Local universities reduced men's migration for study and women's migration for early marriage. The paper highlights the importance of increasing access to higher education for positive social and labor outcomes, particularly for women.

This paper examines if active labor market programs help unemployed job seekers find jobs using a novel random caseworker instrumental variable (IV) design. Leveraging administrative data from Denmark, our identification strategy exploits that (i) job seekers are quasi-randomly assigned to caseworkers, and (ii) caseworkers differ in their tendencies to assign similar job seekers to different programs. Using our IV strategy, we find assignment to classroom training increases employment rates by 25% two years after initial job loss. This finding contrasts with the conclusion reached by ordinary least squares (OLS), which suffers from a negative bias due to selection on unobservables. The employment effects are driven by job seekers who complete the programs (post-program effects) rather than job seekers who exit unemployment upon assignment (threat effects), and the programs help job seekers change occupations. We show that job seekers exposed to offshoring – who tend to experience larger and more persistent employment losses – also have higher employment gains from classroom training. By estimating marginal treatment effects, we conclude that total employment may be increased by targeting training toward job seekers exposed to offshoring.

This paper examines the effect of desert locust infestations on school enrollment of children and young adults between 3 and 24 years of age. We combine individual and household survey data from the 2005-2019 Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) Program with data on the spatial distribution of locust events in Africa. We show that months of exposure to locust infestations have a negative and statistically significant impact on individual schooling status. We find that individuals from farming households are affected more negatively by locust infestations than individuals from non-farming households. We also find that individuals from poorer farming households have a higher school dropout rate than individuals from wealthier farming households, highlighting the role of negative income shocks as a possible transmission mechanism for the effects of desert locust events. Our results also show that the estimated effect is amplified by the household's head educational status. A series of additional robustness tests further corroborate our main findings. We provide a quantitative assessment of the impact of a permanent 1.5 °C rise in global temperature on the frequency of locust events and possible implications for schooling outcomes over time. The results show that a 1.5 °C rise in temperature will decrease accumulated years of schooling by about 1.2 years over a period of 10 years.

School closures induced by the COVID-19 pandemic led to concerns about student learning. This paper evaluates the effect of school closures on student learning in Uzbekistan, using a unique dataset that allows assessing change in learning over time. The findings show that test scores in math for grade 5 students improved over time by 0.29 standard deviation despite school closures. The outcomes among students who were assessed in 2019 improved by an average of 0.72 standard deviation over the next two years, slightly lower than the expected growth of 0.80 standard deviation. The paper explores the reasons for no learning loss.

We study the effect of education on health (hospital stays, number of diagnosed conditions, self-rated poor health, and obesity) over the life-cycle in Germany, using compulsory schooling reforms as a source of exogenous variation. Our results suggest a positive correlation of health and education which increases over the life-cycle. We do not, however, find any positive local average treatment effects of an additional year of schooling on health or health care utilization for individuals up to age 79. An exception is obesity, where positive effects of schooling start to be visible around age 60 and become very large in age group 75-79. The results in age group 75-79 need to be interpreted with caution, however, due to small sample size and possible problems of attrition. Wir untersuchen den Einfluss von Bildung auf die Gesundheit (Krankenhausaufenthalte, Anzahl der diagnostizierten Krankheiten, selbst eingeschätzter schlechter Gesundheitszustand und Fettleibigkeit) über den Lebenszyklus hinweg. Hierzu verwenden wir Reformen zur Verlängerung der Pflichtschulzeit als exogene Variation. Unsere Ergebnisse zeigen eine positive Korrelation zwischen Gesundheit und Bildung auf, die im Laufe des Lebenszyklus zunimmt. Wir finden jedoch keinen kausalen Effekt eines zusätzlichen Schuljahrs auf die Gesundheit oder die Inanspruchnahme von Gesundheitsleistungen für Personen bis zum Alter von 79 Jahren. Eine Ausnahme ist die Fettleibigkeit, bei der positive Auswirkungen der Schulbildung ab einem Alter von 60 sichtbar und in der Altersgruppe 75-79 auch sehr groß werden. Die Ergebnisse in der Altersgruppe 75-79 sind aufgrund des geringen Stichprobenumfangs und möglichen Problemen durch Panelaustritt aber mit Vorsicht zu interpretieren.

Mindfulness-based meditation practices are becoming increasingly popular in Western societies, including in the business world and in education. While the scientific literature has largely documented the benefits of mindfulness meditation for mental health, little is still known about potential spillovers of these practices on other important life outcomes, such as performance. We address this question through a field experiment in an educational setting. We study the causal impact of mindfulness meditation on academic performance through a randomized evaluation of a well-known 8-week mindfulness meditation training delivered to university students on campus. As expected, the intervention improves students’ mental health and non-cognitive skills. However, it takes time before students' performance can benefit from mindfulness meditation: we find that, if anything, the intervention marginally decreases average grades in the short run, i.e., during the exam period right after the end of the intervention, whereas it significantly increases academic performance, by about 0.4 standard deviations, in the long run (ca. 6 months after the end of intervention). We investigate the underlying mechanisms and discuss the implications of our results.

We estimate the effect of the 1999 education reform in Poland on employment and earnings. The 1999 education reform in Poland replaced the previous 8 years of general and 3/4/5 years of tracked secondary education with 9 years of general and 3/3/4 years of tracked upper-secondary education. The reform also introduced new curricula, national examinations, teacher standards, and a transparent financing scheme. Our identification strategy relies on a difference-in-differences approach using a quasi-panel of pooled year-of-survey and age-of-respondent observations from the Polish sample of the EU-SILC database. The results indicate that the reform has increased employment probability (by around 3 percentage points) and earnings (by around 4%).

Action learning has been used as a potential resource of human resource development for adopting collective leadership. The word potential is noteworthy because it is not necessarily the conventional purpose of action learning when adopted as a human resource development tool. It is primarily used as a form of work-based learning. However, its components can be aptly constituted for the former purpose; in fact, action learning may be one of the best HRD methods to prepare participants for collective leadership in the organization.

Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions, but causal identification of those effects is notoriously challenging. Using data from Chile, Croatia, Sweden, and the United States, we study within-family spillovers in college and major choice across a variety of national contexts. Exploiting college-specific admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings’ college options, we show that in all four countries a meaningful portion of younger siblings follow their older sibling to the same college or college-major combination. Older siblings are followed regardless of whether their target and counterfactual options have large, small, or even negative differences in quality. Spillover effects disappear, however, if the older sibling drops out of college, suggesting that older siblings’ college experiences matter. That siblings influence important human capital investment decisions across such varied contexts suggests that our findings are not an artifact of particular institutional detail but a more generalizable description of human behavior. Causal links between the postsecondary paths of close peers may partly explain persistent college enrollment inequalities between social groups, and this suggests that interventions to improve college access may have multiplier effects.

This paper explores the role of school quality in immigrants’ home countries on their earnings in Germany, using native Germans as a benchmark. We propose an empirical analysis that highlights two important insights. First, there is a substantial gap in the returns to education between natives and immigrants in Germany, especially when we consider the quality of schooling in the source country where education was obtained. In particular, lower school quality reduces the endowment advantage that immigrants possess from their education. Second, quality-adjusted education helps us to better understand the potential driving force behind the native–immigrant wage gap. We show that this measure accounts for a substantial fraction of the unexplained part in the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition. These findings emphasize the role of the school quality in explaining the imperfect transferability of human capital of immigrants in Germany.

Although the number of graduates with a bachelor’s degree has risen over recent years, little information is available as to which position such persons hold within an establishment and whether they compete on the career ladder with persons from the vocational sector with advanced further training, for example master craftsmen, technicians or certified senior clerks. This article presents the results of a choice experiment in which decision makers at German establishments had to choose between three candidates to fill a vacant project management position. The candidates had completed either advanced further training or a bachelor’s programme in dual courses of study (training- or practice-integrated). They further differed in other characteristics, such as the place of training, final mark, occupational experience and specialisation. The results show that the training strategy of the establishments as well as their general experience with bachelor’s graduates plays an important role when the chances of career advancement are assessed. Persons with advanced further training certificates are only preferred if the establishments exclusively support advanced training programmes. For all other establishments the qualification path of the candidates does not matter. The results give rise to the supposition that dual higher education studies will represent an attractive alternative for young people as opposed to advanced further training if such dual programmes are expanded and awareness of them increases.

Zusammenfassung: Vor dem Hintergrund gegenwärtiger gesellschaftlicher, politischer und ökonomischer Entwicklungen sowie damit einhergehender Anforderungen an die finanzielle Entscheidungsfähigkeit wird der finanziellen Bildung breiter Bevölkerungsschichten in der aktuellen politischen wie auch wissenschaftlichen Diskussion eine hohe Bedeutung beigemessen. Da es sich jedoch um ein relativ junges Forschungsgebiet handelt, ist bislang noch nicht abschließend geklärt, ob und unter welchen Bedingungen finanzielle Bildung überhaupt einen substanziellen Beitrag zu besseren Finanzentscheidungen leisten kann. Offen ist dabei unter anderem auch, welches ein geeigneter Lernort bzw. damit zusammenhängend ein guter Zeitpunkt für Finanzbildungsmaßnahmen ist, wobei insbesondere die beiden Lernorte ,Schule‘ und ,Arbeitsplatz‘ diskutiert werden. Mit diesem Themenkomplex beschäftigt sich der vorliegende Beitrag, dessen Zielsetzung darin besteht, aktuelle konzeptuelle und empirische Forschungsbefunde zur finanziellen Bildung in der Schule und am Arbeitsplatz zusammenfassend darzustellen sowie einer kritischen Würdigung zu unterziehen, um auf dieser Basis Schlussfolgerungen für Wissenschaft und Politik abzuleiten. Summary: Against the backdrop of current social, political and economic developments and the associated demands on financial decision-making skills, the financial education of broad sections of the population is accorded great importance in the current political and academic debate. However, as this is a relatively new field of research, it has not yet been conclusively clarified whether and under what conditions financial education can make a substantial contribution to better financial decisions. Among other things, it is still unclear which is a suitable place of learning and, in this context, a good time for financial education interventions, whereby the two places of learning ’school’ and ’workplace’ are being discussed in particular. This article deals with this issue and aims to summarize current conceptual and empirical findings on financial education in schools and at the workplace, and to critically assess them in order to draw conclusions for research and policy.

Bullying cannot be tolerated as a normal social behavior portraying a child's life. This paper quantifies its negative consequences allowing for the possibility that victims and nonvictims differ in unobservable characteristics. To this end, we introduce a factor analytic model for identifying treatment effects of bullying in which latent cognitive and noncognitive skills determine victimization and multiple outcomes. We use early test scores to identify the distribution of these skills. Individual‐, classroom‐ and district‐level variables are also accounted for. Applying our method to longitudinal data from South Korea, we first show that while noncognitive skills reduce the chances of being bullied during middle school, the probability of being victimized is greater in classrooms with relatively high concentration of boys, previously self‐assessed bullies and students that come from violent families. We report bullying at age 15 has negative effects on physical and mental health outcomes at age 18. We also uncover heterogeneous effects by latent skills, from which we document positive effects on the take‐up of risky behaviors and negative effects on schooling attainment. Our findings suggest that investing in noncognitive development should guide policy efforts intended to deter this problematic behavior.

This article investigates the efficiency of the university education using two linked databases (Saber Pro and Saber 11) from the Colombian Institute for Evaluation of Education (ICFES) corresponding to 2014. We use a non-parametric frontier approach that combines the “order m” technique with the concept of a meta-frontier to disaggregate students’ total efficiency in generic skills in quantitative reasoning, critical reading, and written communication, into the parts attributable to the students themselves and the university. The analysis is performed by academic programme and by education sector (public vs. private). Results indicate that most of the inefficiency of students in the assessment of generic skills in higher education is attributable to the students themselves and a significant number of students could improve their performance in the assessment in each of the academic programmes if they performed as efficiently as those located on the frontier. Furthermore, the inefficiency share of students varies between academic programmes and university sectors, with students in the private sector more inefficient than those in the public sector in some and less inefficient in others. This research constitutes the first application of the technique of “order m” with the approach of the meta-frontier for the analysis of educational efficiency using data at the student and university levels.

This paper investigates whether aspirations matter for education, which offers a common route out of poverty. We find that mother aspirations are strongly related to the child’s grade achieved at age 18. The relation is nonlinear, suggesting there is a threshold, and depends on caste, household income and the village setting. The coefficients remain large and significant when applying control function estimation, using firstborn son as instrument. A similar strong relation is observed with learning outcomes, including local language, English and maths test results, and with attending school, but not with attending private education. These results are confirmed for outcomes at age 15. The findings provide direct evidence on the contribution of mother aspirations to children’s education outcomes and point to aspirations as a channel of intergenerational mobility. They suggest that education outcomes can be improved more rapidly by taking aspirations into account when targeting education programmes, and through interventions that shape aspirations.

Summary: Financial literacy is very important for social participation. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of the determinants of financial literacy among students at a German university. An additional goal is the identification of gender differences in respect to financial literacy. The evaluation is based on the definition and surveys of financial literacy developed by the OECD, (A. Lusardi & Mitchell, 2014) and (Chen & Volpe, 1998) and the analysis of the “Big Three” questions. The results suggest a rather low level of financial literacy among female students. Additional factors such as a very good mathematics grade and logical thinking have a significantly positive impact on financial literacy. Students in economics are more likely to answer the “Big Three” questions correctly. This finding supports the hypothesis that education in economics helps to acquire knowledge of financial instruments and financial application. Zusammenfassung: Finanzkompetenzen haben für die gesellschaftliche Teilhabe eine hohe Bedeutung. Dieser Beitrag führt eine empirische Evaluation der Determinanten der Finanzkompetenz von Studierenden an einer deutschen Hochschule durch. Ein weiteres Ziel ist auch die Identifizierung der geschlechtsspezifischen Unterschiede bei der Finanzkompetenz. Die Evaluierung basiert auf der Definition und den Erhebungen zur Finanzkompetenz, die von der OECD entwickelt wurden, (A. Lusardi & Mitchell, 2014) und (Chen & Volpe, 1998) sowie auf der Analyse der ”Big Three”-Fragen. Die Ergebnisse deuten auf ein eher geringeres Niveau der Finanzkompetenz unter Studentinnen hin. Weitere Faktoren wie eine gute Mathematiknote und logisches Denken haben signifikant positive Auswirkungen auf die Finanzkompetenz. Studierende der Wirtschaftswissenschaften beantworten die ”Big Three”-Fragen mit höherer Wahrscheinlichkeit richtig. Dieses Ergebnis unterstützt die Hypothese, dass die wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Bildung dazu beiträgt, Kenntnisse über Finanzinstrumente und deren Anwendung zu erwerben.

Most creatives acquire professional talents by learning from others, but in most settings it is difficult to estimate the existence of long-term effects. This paper explores the transmission of skills over a period of more than seven centuries by focusing on the case of music composers. We ask the question: how does a composer’s quality influence the quality of the composers he or she teaches? Our analysis builds on a unique dataset of 17,433 composers from around the world since the fourteenth century. By comparing actual teacher–student pairs with plausible counterfactual pairs and by using a two-stage framework, we show a strong effect of quality transmission. Moreover, we find quality transmission persists across multiple generations: from teacher to student, and subsequently to student’s student and so on. Our results provide new insights on drivers of creativity over the very long term, as well as the influence of teachers on students' achievements., Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

In predominantly agrarian economies with limited irrigation, rainfall plays a critical role in shaping households’ incomes and subsequently their spending decisions. This study uses household-level panel data from a nationally representative survey in India to estimate the effect of agricultural productivity shocks – as proxied by exogenous annual rainfall deviations from long-term average – on education expenditures and children’s work status in rural Indian households. Our results show that a transitory increase in rainfall significantly reduces education expenditures and increases the likelihood of child labor across a range of work activities. Additionally, we show that productivity-enhancing inputs such as land ownership and credit access do not mitigate these countercyclical effects of rainfall variations, indicating the importance of market imperfections (in labor and land markets). We also find that the effects of productivity shocks are reinforced for historically marginalized castes, and moderated for more educated households. These highlight that the average effects mask considerable heterogeneity based on household and regional characteristics

Die Zahl der Privatschüler*innen steigt in Deutschland stetig, insbesondere in Ostdeutschland. Besonders häufig kommen sie aus Haushalten mit hohem Einkommen und hohem Bildungsniveau. Dieser Wochenbericht untersucht, welche Rolle die räumliche Verteilung von Privatschulen für die Struktur der Schüler*innenschaft spielt. In einem ersten Schritt wird untersucht, in welchen Gegenden es Privatschulen gibt. Dabei zeigt sich, dass Privatschulen in Ostdeutschland geografisch breiter und zufälliger verteilt sind als in Westdeutschland – es gibt sie also nicht nur dort, wo vor allem privilegierte Haushalte wohnen. In einem zweiten Schritt wird untersucht, ob die geografische Nähe zu einer Privatschule den Besuch selbiger wahrscheinlicher macht. Es zeigt sich, dass das bei einkommensstarken und bildungsnahen Haushalten der Fall ist. Einkommensschwache und bildungsferne Haushalte schicken ihre Kinder hingegen auch dann nicht häufiger auf eine Privatschule, wenn sie in deren Nähe wohnen. Offenbar stellen private Schulen für sie meistens keine Alternative dar. Wie weitere Analysen zeigen, ist dies auch, aber nicht allein durch das Schulgeld zu erklären. Nötig sind daher unter anderem zugänglichere Informationen über Privatschulen. Diese könnten stärker öffentlich gefördert werden – letztlich müssen aber auch öffentliche Schulen für privilegierte Haushalte attraktiver werden, um soziale Unterschiede mit Blick auf die Schulwahl zu reduzieren., DIW Wochenbericht

With the goal to shed more light on the effectiveness of parental time spent with their children, I estimate the causal relationship between parental involvement and education outcomes of children. My research is the first which examines the effect of parental time in terms of the engagement in child's everyday life. Moreover, I improve the existing literature by including the characteristics of children as well as parents. To estimate causal treatment effects, I use a simple logistic regression along with a subclassification on the propensity score. By subclassification, the systematic differences in baseline characteristics are eliminated. The education outcome is represented by a binary variable denoting whether the respondent completed high school or not. Completing high school improves person's economic selfsufficiency and civic engagement. The results indicate higher probability of graduating from high school with higher parental involvement. Moreover, the probability decreases when child disobeys his or her parent. Most importantly, the results suggest that the expected probability of completing high school decreases with more strict parental behavior.