Long-Lasting Effects of Socialist Education∗

Political regimes influence the contents of education and the criteria used to select and evaluate students. We study the impact of a socialist education on the likelihood of obtaining a college degree, as well as on several labor market outcomes, by exploiting the reorganization of the school system in East Germany after reunification. Our identification strategy utilizes cut-off birth dates for school enrollment that lead to variation in the length of exposure to the socialist education system within the same birth cohort. We find that an additional year of socialist education substantially decreases the probability of ∗We thank Bettina Brüggemann, Martin Butzert, Leonhard Czerny, and Alexander Nold for excellent research assistantship, and seminar and conference participants at CERGE-EI, the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance (EIEF), the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Oxford University, University of Nottingham, the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), University of Warwick (Workshop on Human Capital and Productivity), University of Bristol, the Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH), University of Sussex, and the Society for Economic Dynamics Annual Meeting 2010 for helpful comments. Fuchs-Schündeln gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Cluster of Excellence "Formation of Normative Orders" and the European Research Council under Starting Grant No. 262116.