Financial literacy predicts informed financial decisions, but what explains financial literacy? We use the concept of financial socialization and aim to represent three major agents of financial socialization: family, school and work. Thus we compile twelve relevant childhood characteristics in...

It is well established that teachers are the most important in-school factorin determining student outcomes. However, to date there is scant robustquantitative research demonstrating that teacher training programs can havelasting impacts on student test scores. To address this gap, weconduct...

This paper considers a fundamental question about the school environment - what are the long run effects of a student’s ordinal rank in elementary school? Using administrative data from all public school students in Texas, we show that students with a higher third grade academic rank,...

The previous literature has shown that children who enter school at a more advanced age outperform their younger classmates on competency tests taken between kindergarten and Grade 10. This study analyzes whether these effects of school starting age continue into adulthood. Based on data on math...

This paper analyzes optimal grading in a world that focuses on top grades. Students choose an effort level, their performance is graded, and their grade correlates with their future income. Ex-ante, the policy maker chooses the optimal coarseness of the grading scale to maximize student welfare....

Over the past decades, the share of very young children in daycare has increased significantly in many OECD countries, including Germany. Despite the relevance of child health for child development and later life success, the effect of early daycare attendance on health has received little...

Open access means that research outputs, such as articles and data, are free of restrictions on access and free of restrictions on use. In the light of recent market developments in academic publishing, we argue in this essay that the discourse about open access must include a discussion about...

There is considerable debate regarding the use of intellectual property rights (IPR) to spur innovation in the software industry. In this paper we focus on the choice of intellectual property right regimes and industry growth. We begin by developing a growth optimal mixture of open source and...

This RCT examines the effect of a new style finance training during which participants are given personalized feedback on their financial business outcomes in addition to a "rules-of-thumb" training approach. We compare this to the effects of a "rules-of-thumb" training by itself and to a...