Mathias Huebener

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.

Paid Parental Leave and Child Development: Evidence from the 2007 German Parental Benefit Reform and Administrative Data

This paper examines the effects of a substantial change in publicly funded paid parental leave in Germany on child development and socio-economic development gaps. For children born before January 1, 2007, parental leave benefits were means-tested and paid for up to 24 months after childbirth. For children born thereafter, parental leave benefits were earnings-related and only paid for up to 14 months. Higher-income households benefited more from the reform than low-income households. We study the reform effects on childrens language skills, motor skills, socio-emotional stability, and school readiness using administrative data from mandatory school entrance examinations at age six and a difference-in-differences design. We find no impact of the reform on child development and socio-economic development gaps. The effects are precisely estimated and robust to various model specifications and sample definitions. Our resultssuggest that such substantial changes in parental leave benefits are unlikely to impact childrens development. These findings are consistent with recent studies showing that temporary unrestricted transfers and maternal part-time employment have a limited impact on parental investments in their children.