Ludger Woessmann
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 1013758 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Ludger Woessmann |
| PRENOMES | Ludger |
| SOBRENOME | Woessmann |
| ASSINATURA | WOESSMANN L |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Ifo Institute for Economic Research |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6912-2319 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 34 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 656 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 34 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2007 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 10 |
Patience and Subnational Differences in Human Capital
Decisions to invest in human capital depend on people's time preferences. This paper shows that differences in patience are closely related to substantial subnational differences in educational achievement, leading to new perspectives on long-standing within-country disparities. We use social media data—Facebook interests—to construct novel regional measures of patience within Italy and the United States. The approach is first validated with a cr…
Religion and Growth
We use the elements of a macroeconomic production function—physical capital, human capital, labor, and technology—together with standard growth models to frame the role of religion in economic growth. Unifying a growing literature, we argue that religion can enhance or impinge upon economic growth through all four elements because it shapes individual preferences, societal norms, and institutions. Religion affects physical capital accumulation by…
The ifo Education Survey 2014–2021
The ifo Education Survey is a representative opinion survey of the German voting-age population on education topics that has been conducted annually since 2014. It covers public preferences on a wide range of education policy issues ranging from early childhood education, schools, and apprenticeships to university education and life-long learning. The dataset comprises several survey experiments that facilitate investigating the causal effects of…
Can internet surveys represent the entire population? A practitioners’ analysis
Global universal basic skills
Can Mentoring Alleviate Family Disadvantage in Adolescence? A Field Experiment to Improve Labor Market Prospects
We study a mentoring program that aims to improve the labor-market prospects of school- attending adolescents from disadvantaged families by offering them a university-student mentor. Our RCT investigates program effectiveness on three outcome dimensions that are highly predictive of adolescents' later labor-market success: math grades, patience/social skills, and labor-market orientation. For low-SES adolescents, the one-to-one mentoring increas…
Growing up in ethnic enclaves
Does the regional concentration of immigrants of the same ethnicity affect immigrant children’s acquisition of host country language skills and educational attainment? We exploit the concentration of five ethnic groups in 1985 emanating from the exogenous placement of guest workers across German regions during the 1960s and 1970s. Results from a model with region and ethnicity fixed effects indicate that exposure to a higher own ethnic concentrat…
Covid-19 and educational inequality
Patience, Risk-Taking, and Human Capital Investment Across Countries
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 v…
Does Ignorance of Economic Returns and Costs Explain the Educational Aspiration Gap? Representative Evidence from Adults and Adolescents
The gap in university enrolment by parental education is large and persistent in many countries. In our representative survey of German adults, 74% of university graduates, but only 36% of those without a university degree, favour university education for their children. The latter are more likely to underestimate returns and overestimate costs of university. Similarly, 75% of adolescents with university‐educated parents, but only 51% without uni…
Information provision and preferences for education spending
The Separation and Reunification of Germany
German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly selected treatment and control groups. First, the later border is already visible in many socio-economic characteristics in pre-World War II data. Second, Worl…
Social Cohesion, Religious Beliefs, and the Effect of Protestantism on Suicide
In an economic theory of suicide, we model social cohesion of the religious community and religious beliefs about afterlife as two mechanisms by which Protestantism increases suicide propensity. We build a unique microregional data set of 452 Prussian counties for 1816 to 1821 and 1869 to 1871, when religiousness was still pervasive. Exploiting the concentric dispersion of Protestantism around Wittenberg, our instrumental variable model finds tha…
General Education, Vocational Education, and Labor-Market Outcomes over the Lifecycle
Policy debates about the balance of vocational and general education programs focus on the school-to-work transition. But with rapid technological change, gains in youth employment from vocational education may be offset by less adaptability and thus diminished employment later in life. To test our main hypothesis that any relative labor-market advantage of vocational education decreases with age, we employ a difference-in-differences approach th…
The Empire is Dead, Long Live the Empire! Long‐Run Persistence of Trust and Corruption in the Bureaucracy
Do empires affect attitudes towards the state long after their demise? We hypothesize that the \nHabsburg Empire with its localized and well-respected administration increased citizens’ trust in \nlocal public services. In several Eastern European countries, communities on both sides of the \nlong-gone Habsburg border have been sharing common formal institutions for a century now. \nIdentifying from individuals living within a restricted band aro…
The Importance of School Systems
Students in some countries do far better on international achievement tests than students in other countries. Is this all due to differences in what students bring with them to school-socioeconomic background, cultural factors, and the like? Or do school systems make a difference? This essay argues that differences in features of countries' school systems, and in particular their institutional structures, account for a substantial part of the cro…
The Knowledge Capital of Nations
A rigorous, pathbreaking analysis demonstrating that a country's prosperity is directly related in the long run to the skills of its population. In this book Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann make a simple, central claim, developed with rigorous theoretical and empirical support: knowledge is the key to a country's development. Of course, every country acknowledges the importance of developing human capital, but Hanushek and Woessmann argue that…
Returns to skills around the world
Ipehd—The ifo Prussian Economic History Database
This article describes the ifo Prussian Economic History Database (iPEHD), a public use county-level database covering a rich collection of variables for nineteenth-century Prussia. The Royal Prussian Statistical Office collected these data in several censuses over the years 1816–1901. These data provide a unique source for micro-regional empirical research in economic history, enabling analyses of education, religion, fertility, industrializatio…
School competition and students’ entrepreneurial intentions
Do better schools lead to more growth? Cognitive skills, economic outcomes, and causation
We provide evidence that the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth reflects a causal effect of cognitive skills and supports the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking student achievement across countries, over time, and along the within-country distribution. Extensive sensitivity analyses of cross-country growth regressions generate remarkably stable results acr…
The effect of investment in children’s education on fertility in 1816 Prussia
Does school autonomy make sense everywhere? Panel estimates from Pisa
The impact of teacher subject knowledge on student achievement
Schooling, educational achievement, and the Latin American growth puzzle
Was Weber Wrong? A Human Capital Theory of Protestant Economic History
Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestant regions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory, where Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. County-level data from late 19th-century Prussia reveal that Protestantism was indeed associated not only with higher economic prosperity, but also with better education. We fi…
The Empire is Dead, Long Live the Empire! Long‐Run Persistence of Trust and Corruption in the Bureaucracy
Do empires affect attitudes towards the state long after their demise? We hypothesize that the \nHabsburg Empire with its localized and well-respected administration increased citizens’ trust in \nlocal public services. In several Eastern European countries, communities on both sides of the \nlong-gone Habsburg border have been sharing common formal institutions for a century now. \nIdentifying from individuals living within a restricted band aro…
Broadband Infrastructure and Economic Growth
We estimate the effect of broadband infrastructure, which enables high-speed internet, on economic growth in the panel of OECD countries in 1996-2007. Our instrumental variable model derives its non-linear first stage from a logistic diffusion model where pre-existing voice telephony and cable TV networks predict maximum broadband penetration. We find that a 10 percentage point increase in broadband penetration raised annual per capita growth by …
The Role Of Education Quality For Economic Growth
The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions.This paper reviews the role of education in promoting economic well-being, with a particular focus on the role of educational quality.It concludes that there is strong evidence that the cognitive skills of the population -rather than mere school attainment -a…
Does school autonomy make sense everywhere? Panel estimates from Pisa
Schooling, educational achievement, and the Latin American growth puzzle
Every Catholic Child in a Catholic School’
Nineteenth-century Catholic doctrine strongly opposed state schooling. We show that countries with larger shares of Catholics in 1900 (but without a Catholic state religion) tend to have larger shares of privately operated schools even today. We use this historical pattern as a natural experiment to estimate the causal effect of contemporary private competition on student achievement in cross-country student-level analyses. Our results show that …
The Separation and Reunification of Germany
German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly selected treatment and control groups. First, the later border is already visible in many socio-economic characteristics in pre-World War II data. Second, Worl…
Ipehd—The ifo Prussian Economic History Database
This article describes the ifo Prussian Economic History Database (iPEHD), a public use county-level database covering a rich collection of variables for nineteenth-century Prussia. The Royal Prussian Statistical Office collected these data in several censuses over the years 1816–1901. These data provide a unique source for micro-regional empirical research in economic history, enabling analyses of education, religion, fertility, industrializatio…
The impact of teacher subject knowledge on student achievement
The Importance of School Systems
Students in some countries do far better on international achievement tests than students in other countries. Is this all due to differences in what students bring with them to school-socioeconomic background, cultural factors, and the like? Or do school systems make a difference? This essay argues that differences in features of countries' school systems, and in particular their institutional structures, account for a substantial part of the cro…
Education and Catch-up in the Industrial Revolution
Research increasingly stresses the role of human capital in modern economic development. Existing historical evidence—mostly from British textile industries—however, rejects that formal education was important for the Industrial Revolution. Our new evidence from technological follower Prussia uses a unique school enrollment and factory employment database linking 334 counties from pre-industrial 1816 to two industrial phases in 1849 and 1882. Usi…
Patience, Risk-Taking, and Human Capital Investment Across Countries
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 v…
Growing up in ethnic enclaves
Does the regional concentration of immigrants of the same ethnicity affect immigrant children’s acquisition of host country language skills and educational attainment? We exploit the concentration of five ethnic groups in 1985 emanating from the exogenous placement of guest workers across German regions during the 1960s and 1970s. Results from a model with region and ethnicity fixed effects indicate that exposure to a higher own ethnic concentrat…
Global universal basic skills
Can Mentoring Alleviate Family Disadvantage in Adolescence? A Field Experiment to Improve Labor Market Prospects
We study a mentoring program that aims to improve the labor-market prospects of school- attending adolescents from disadvantaged families by offering them a university-student mentor. Our RCT investigates program effectiveness on three outcome dimensions that are highly predictive of adolescents' later labor-market success: math grades, patience/social skills, and labor-market orientation. For low-SES adolescents, the one-to-one mentoring increas…
Does Ignorance of Economic Returns and Costs Explain the Educational Aspiration Gap? Representative Evidence from Adults and Adolescents
The gap in university enrolment by parental education is large and persistent in many countries. In our representative survey of German adults, 74% of university graduates, but only 36% of those without a university degree, favour university education for their children. The latter are more likely to underestimate returns and overestimate costs of university. Similarly, 75% of adolescents with university‐educated parents, but only 51% without uni…
The Role Of Education Quality For Economic Growth
The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions.This paper reviews the role of education in promoting economic well-being, with a particular focus on the role of educational quality.It concludes that there is strong evidence that the cognitive skills of the population -rather than mere school attainment -a…
The Role of Cognitive Skills in Economic Development
The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions. This paper reviews the role of cognitive skills in promoting economic well-being, with a particular focus on the role of school quality and quantity. It concludes that there is strong evidence that the cognitive skills of the population—rather than mere scho…
Was Weber Wrong? A Human Capital Theory of Protestant Economic History
Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestant regions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory, where Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. County-level data from late 19th-century Prussia reveal that Protestantism was indeed associated not only with higher economic prosperity, but also with better education. We fi…
The trade-off between fertility and education
Every Catholic Child in a Catholic School’
Nineteenth-century Catholic doctrine strongly opposed state schooling. We show that countries with larger shares of Catholics in 1900 (but without a Catholic state religion) tend to have larger shares of privately operated schools even today. We use this historical pattern as a natural experiment to estimate the causal effect of contemporary private competition on student achievement in cross-country student-level analyses. Our results show that …
New Empirical Analysis in the Economics of Education
Research in the economics of education has expanded rapidly all over the world in recent years. Scholars have not only inquired into an array of novel topics but they have become increasingly aware of methodological challenges posed by endogenous relationships among the variables of interest. A leading example is research on school choice, because choice necessarily implies selection and the variables that influence selection may be fundamentally…
The Economics of International Differences in Educational Achievement
Education and Catch-up in the Industrial Revolution
Research increasingly stresses the role of human capital in modern economic development. Existing historical evidence—mostly from British textile industries—however, rejects that formal education was important for the Industrial Revolution. Our new evidence from technological follower Prussia uses a unique school enrollment and factory employment database linking 334 counties from pre-industrial 1816 to two industrial phases in 1849 and 1882. Usi…
Broadband Infrastructure and Economic Growth
We estimate the effect of broadband infrastructure, which enables high-speed internet, on economic growth in the panel of OECD countries in 1996-2007. Our instrumental variable model derives its non-linear first stage from a logistic diffusion model where pre-existing voice telephony and cable TV networks predict maximum broadband penetration. We find that a 10 percentage point increase in broadband penetration raised annual per capita growth by …
Do better schools lead to more growth? Cognitive skills, economic outcomes, and causation
We provide evidence that the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth reflects a causal effect of cognitive skills and supports the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking student achievement across countries, over time, and along the within-country distribution. Extensive sensitivity analyses of cross-country growth regressions generate remarkably stable results acr…
The effect of investment in children’s education on fertility in 1816 Prussia
Does school autonomy make sense everywhere? Panel estimates from Pisa
The impact of teacher subject knowledge on student achievement
Schooling, educational achievement, and the Latin American growth puzzle
School competition and students’ entrepreneurial intentions
Ipehd—The ifo Prussian Economic History Database
This article describes the ifo Prussian Economic History Database (iPEHD), a public use county-level database covering a rich collection of variables for nineteenth-century Prussia. The Royal Prussian Statistical Office collected these data in several censuses over the years 1816–1901. These data provide a unique source for micro-regional empirical research in economic history, enabling analyses of education, religion, fertility, industrializatio…
The Knowledge Capital of Nations
A rigorous, pathbreaking analysis demonstrating that a country's prosperity is directly related in the long run to the skills of its population. In this book Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann make a simple, central claim, developed with rigorous theoretical and empirical support: knowledge is the key to a country's development. Of course, every country acknowledges the importance of developing human capital, but Hanushek and Woessmann argue that…
Returns to skills around the world
The Empire is Dead, Long Live the Empire! Long‐Run Persistence of Trust and Corruption in the Bureaucracy
Do empires affect attitudes towards the state long after their demise? We hypothesize that the \nHabsburg Empire with its localized and well-respected administration increased citizens’ trust in \nlocal public services. In several Eastern European countries, communities on both sides of the \nlong-gone Habsburg border have been sharing common formal institutions for a century now. \nIdentifying from individuals living within a restricted band aro…
The Importance of School Systems
Students in some countries do far better on international achievement tests than students in other countries. Is this all due to differences in what students bring with them to school-socioeconomic background, cultural factors, and the like? Or do school systems make a difference? This essay argues that differences in features of countries' school systems, and in particular their institutional structures, account for a substantial part of the cro…
General Education, Vocational Education, and Labor-Market Outcomes over the Lifecycle
Policy debates about the balance of vocational and general education programs focus on the school-to-work transition. But with rapid technological change, gains in youth employment from vocational education may be offset by less adaptability and thus diminished employment later in life. To test our main hypothesis that any relative labor-market advantage of vocational education decreases with age, we employ a difference-in-differences approach th…
Social Cohesion, Religious Beliefs, and the Effect of Protestantism on Suicide
In an economic theory of suicide, we model social cohesion of the religious community and religious beliefs about afterlife as two mechanisms by which Protestantism increases suicide propensity. We build a unique microregional data set of 452 Prussian counties for 1816 to 1821 and 1869 to 1871, when religiousness was still pervasive. Exploiting the concentric dispersion of Protestantism around Wittenberg, our instrumental variable model finds tha…
Information provision and preferences for education spending
The Separation and Reunification of Germany
German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly selected treatment and control groups. First, the later border is already visible in many socio-economic characteristics in pre-World War II data. Second, Worl…
Covid-19 and educational inequality
Economics (26 obras) · Political science (22 obras) · Psychology (16 obras) · Economic growth (14 obras) · Demographic economics (13 obras) · Sociology (13 obras) · School Choice and Performance (10 obras) · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies (9 obras) · Economic Growth and Productivity (9 obras) · Geography (9 obras)