Suchergebnisse

This dissertation consists of four distinct empirical essays that address various aspects of the economics of education. Chapters 2 and 3 show that patience and risk-taking as intertemporal preferences are closely related to differences in student achievement across and within countries. Chapter 3 hereby employs novel machine-learning methods to derive intertemporal preference measures from Facebook data. Using a field experiment among university students, chapter 4 shows that the ordering in which positive and negative performance feedback is provided, matters for study motivation and to some extent also exam performance. Finally, chapter 5 presents new insights to gender gaps in adult cognitive skills, showing that they are highly related to wages, especially at the top of the wage distribution.

Abstract
Patience and risk-taking—two preference components that steer intertemporal decision-making—are fundamental to human capital investment decisions. To understand how they contribute to international skill differences, we combine Programme for International Student Assessment tests with the Global Preference Survey. We find that opposing effects of patience (positive) and risk-taking (negative) together account for two-thirds of the cross-country variation in student skills. In an identification strategy addressing unobserved residence country features, we find similar results when assigning migrant students their country-of-origin preferences in models with residence country fixed effects. Associations of national preferences with family and school inputs suggest that both may act as channels.

The coronavirus crisis has caused severe economic, social and health disruptions worldwide. Children and young adults were among those who suffered most from the effects of the pandemic. Schoolchildren and students faced learning losses, and time spent on school activities dropped by about one-half. Likewise, apprentices and young adults in vocational training experienced learning losses due to school closures and reduced in-person training time. With declining enrolment rates in high school and college, the pandemic caused a major and unprecedented disruption in (higher) education. In many OECD countries, youth unemployment increased sharply, especially at the beginning of the pandemic. In addition to all that, mental health deteriorated within the younger population. This shows us how important it is to learn from these negative consequences for a large part of the population and to ensure in the future that no one is left behind in times of crisis.