Compulsory military service typically drafts young men when they are at the height of their learning ability. Thus, it can be expected to depress the demand for higher education since skill atrophy and the delayed entry into the civilian labor market reduce the returns to human-capital investments. Attending university, however, might open the possibility to avoid the draft, leading to an incre...

Some Remarks on the Effectiveness of Primary Education Interventions In this paper I survey the recent economics of education literature in order to identify which education policies can effectively improve the quality of primary schooling, as measured by pupil test-based achievements. Particular attention is devoted to the experience of England, a country which has made substantial investments...

The Effect of Extra Funding for Disadvantaged Pupils on Achievement This paper evaluates the effects of two subsidies targeted at disadvantaged pupils in the Netherlands. The first scheme gives primary schools with at least 70 percent minority pupils extra funding for personnel. The second scheme gives primary schools with at least 70 percent pupils from different disadvantaged groups extra fun...

In 1989 the Hong Kong government embarked on a program to increase the provision of first-year first-degree places. The expansion of tertiary education represents a large and exogenous increase in supply of university graduates to the territory. This paper measures the labor market effects of the expansion program by studying the changes in earnings premium for university graduates. Two alterna...

Does More Generous Student Aid Increase Enrolment Rates into Higher Education? Evaluating the German Student Aid Reform of 2001 Students from low-income families are eligible to student aid under the federal students’ financial assistance scheme (BAfoeG) in Germany. We evaluate the effectiveness of a recent reform of student aid that substantially increased the amount received by eligible stude...

This paper explores how language policy affects the socio-economic development of nation states through two channels: the individual’s exposure to and (in reference to an individual’s mother tongue) linguistic distance from the official language. In a cross-country framework the paper first establishes a robust and sizeable negative relationship between an official language that is distant from...

On Educational Performance Measures Quantitative school performance measures (QPMs) are playing an ever larger role in education systems on both sides of the Atlantic. In this paper we outline the rationale for the use of such measures in education, review the literature relating to several important problems associated with their use, and argue that they nonetheless have a positive role to pla...

Intergenerational Transmission of Educational Attainment in Germany: The Last Five Decades Over the last decades the German education system underwent numerous reforms in order to improve "equality of opportunity", i.e. to guarantee all pupils equal access to higher education. At the same time internationally comparative evidence yields that Germany features particularly low intergenerational m...

Student Loan Reforms for German Higher Education: Financing Tuition Fees It is generally agreed that the funding base for German universities is inadequate and perhaps the time has come for serious consideration of the imposition of non-trivial tuition charges. Against this background, this paper compares conventional and income contingent loans for financing tuition fees at German universities...

This paper creates a pseudo cohort of individuals who left school in the mid-1990s, using Labour Force Survey. The extent of low achievement at school amongst this group is documented, and then the impact of such low achievement on labour force status is estimated. The main focus of the paper is then to investigate to what extent unqualified school leavers can improve their labour market status...