Project Details
Projekt
Educational Interventions and Labour Market-Related Outcomes
Subject Area
Economic Policy, Applied Economics
Term
since 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 518302089
The education of children and young adults is crucial to reducing skill mismatch and labor scarcity in the workforce. Education policies can affect various aspects of the transition from school to the labor market and thus play an important role in addressing labor scarcity. In addition, education is crucial to mitigate skill mismatch as early investments in education allows for flexibility and further training later on. In this project, we seek to provide insights on policy measures for addressing labor market challenges through educational interventions (policy reforms and randomized controlled trials). We propose to evaluate the impact of three educational interventions on skills and labor market outcomes. The first intervention is a policy reform that reduces the duration of high school by one year, potentially increasing labor supply by allowing earlier labor market entry. No study has evaluated whether the reform was actually effective in achieving its main goal: bringing highly skilled students to the labor market earlier. Therefore, we examine the impact of the reform on the age of entry into the labor market (relating this to labor scarcity), but also on wages and skill mismatch. The second and third interventions are randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that intend to address skill mismatch, in particular undereducation, underskilling, and skill gaps. The RCTs aim to improve the language and literacy skills of children and adolescents by providing them with innovative reading and listening resources, such as e-book readers and audiobooks. RCT 1 is a reading intervention among low-income children, while RCT 2 is a reading and listening intervention with a focus on young people with a migration background. We will examine the impact of providing e-readers and audiobooks on children’s and young people’s reading skills, overall academic achievement, labor market aspirations and transitions into the labor market, as well as the impact on skill gaps and undereducation. The two RCTs will be the first to study the effect of free access to e-readers and audiobooks on long-term education and labor-market related outcomes in a high-income country. Further, RCT 2 will provide a first causal assessment of the effectiveness of audiobooks in fostering language skills among immigrant children. In our empirical analyses, we will rely on different data sets, including administrative data on labor market outcomes, the German Microcensus, and self-collected survey data. For causal identification, we will make use of recently developed difference-in-differences estimators (part I) as well the random assignment of e-readers (part II) and audiobooks (part III). Our findings will be of interest to both policy makers and researchers, as our project aims to provide new evidence on the effects of educational interventions on the quality and quantity of the labor force, skill mismatch and labor scarcity.
DFG Programme
Research Units
Co-Investigators
Professorin Dr. Silke Anger; Dr. Bernhard Christoph; Dr. Frauke Peter; Professor Dr. Malte Sandner
