Jan Marcus

Increased Instruction Hours and the Widening Gap in Student Performance

Do increased instruction hours improve the performance of all students? Using PISA scores of students in ninth grade, we analyse the effect of a German education reform that increased weekly instruction hours by two hours (6.5 percent) overalmost five years. In the additional time, students are taught new learning content. On average, the reform improves student performance. However, treatment effects are small and differ across the student performance distribution. While low-performing students do not benefit, high-performing students benefit the most. The findings suggest that increases in instruction hours can widen the gap between low- and high-performing students.

Moving Up a Gear: The Impact of Compressing Instructional Time into Fewer Years of Schooling

Policy-makers face a trade-off between the provision of higher levels of schooling and earlier labour market entries. A fundamental education reform in Germany tackles this trade-off by reducing high school by one year while leaving the total instructional time unchanged. Employing administrative data on all high school graduates in 2002-2013 in Germany, we exploit both temporal and regional variation in the implementation of the reform and study the overall effectiveness of this reform. We find that compressing the high school track by one year reduces the mean high school graduation age by about 10 months. The probability to repeat a grade level in the course of high school increases by 21 percent (3 percentage points), peaking in the final three years before graduation. However, the high school graduation rate is not affected. The results indicate the reform’s success in reducing the graduation age, though it stays behind its potential benefits for labour markets and social security schemes because of higher grade repetition rates.

Income and longevity revisited: do high-earning women live longer?

The empirical relationship between income and longevity has been addressed by a large number of studies, but most were confined to men. For the first time we analyze a large data set from the German public pension scheme on women who died between 1994 and 2005, employing both non-parametric and parametric methods. We find that the relationship between earnings and life expectancy is similar for women and men: Among women who contributed at least for 25 years, women at the 90th percentile of the income distribution can expect to live 3 years longer than women at the 10th percentile.

The Effect of Increasing Education Efficiency on University Enrollment: Evidence from Administrative Data and an Unusual Schooling Reform in Germany

We examine the consequences of compressing secondary schooling for university enrollment. An unusual education reform in Germany reduced the length of academic high school while simultaneously increasing the instruction hours in the remaining years. Accordingly, students receive the same amount of schooling but over a shorter period of time. Based on a difference-in-differences approach and using administrative data on all students in Germany, we find that this reform decreased university enrollment rates. Moreover, students are more likely to delay their enrollment, to drop out of university, and to change their major. We discuss supply-side restrictions, age differences, and increased workload during school as potential mechanisms and present back-of-the-envelope cost–benefit considerations showing that the earnings gain from an extended labor market participation may still offset the adverse effects presented in this study.

Does Quality of Early Childhood Education and Care Affect the Home Learning Environment of Children

Both, a high quality of the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) setting and a high quality of the home learning environment foster children’s development. However, we know little about the interactions between ECEC quality and the home learning environment. We examine whether the child’s attendance in a high ECEC quality setting improves the quality of her home learning environment. We use very rich data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD), which provides detailed panel information through children`s age of 6 months to 9 years on ECEC quality and on the child’s home learning environment. Our analysis is based on a sample of 700 children who have been in non-family child care for at least 10 hours/week. We estimate level and value-added specifications and show that ECEC quality improves the home learning environment at various measurement points. The effects sizes indicate that anincrease in ECEC quality by one standard deviation increases the home learning environment by about 0.08 standard deviations. Furthermore, results differ by sub-groups: The home learning environment from more advantaged children benefits more from higher ECEC quality. Thus the potential of high ECEC quality on the home learning environment is not effectively used for disadvantaged children. Policies could work on this potential link, in particular.