Education & Equal Opportunities

This article shows how Facebook interests can be used to construct subnational measures of patience (“the relative valuation of present versus future payoffs”). Differences in patience are closely related to regional student performance in Italy and the United States. The results provide new perspectives on long-standing differences between the countries.

How far away is the world from ensuring that every child obtains at least basic skills? And what would it mean for world development to reach the goal of global universal basic skills? This article addresses these two intertwined questions in a new study. The authors draw on the individual-level test data from available international and regional student assessments to develop world estimates of the share of children not achieving basic skills in each country and then show the economic costs of these deficits.

With ongoing demographic and economic changes, documenting the distribution of economic resources within a society is a recurring task for applied economic research that can never be considered complete. In Germany, several studies have investigated trends in earnings and income inequality in the past few years. However, a recent and comprehensive account of inequality in Germany that also considers dimensions other than earnings and income inequality is currently not available. This article documents the development of inequalities in Germany over the years from 1983 to 2020.

This article evaluates the effectiveness of one of the largest mentoring programs for disadvantaged adolescents in Germany. The aim of the program “Rock Your Life!” is the successful transition of adolescents from lower secondary school to an apprenticeship or upper secondary school. Mentoring programs can strongly improve the transition from school to work for disadvantaged adolescents. The results show that substituting a lack of family support with other adults can help disadvantaged children in adolescence.

Workers’ skills are essential to their success on the labor market. However, the empirical evidence on the economic impact of higher skills is still limited due to how skills are measured. In this article, the authors develop novel measures of workers’ skills that are comprehensive, highly detailed, and directly relevant to the labor market. To this end, they leverage the characteristics of the German apprenticeship system, which offers three main advantages for measuring skills and analyzing their labor market potential.