Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/107423 
Year of Publication: 
2015
Series/Report no.: 
DIW Discussion Papers No. 1450
Publisher: 
Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW), Berlin
Abstract: 
Policy-makers face a trade-off between the provision of higher levels of schooling and earlier labour market entries. A fundamental education reform in Germany tackles this trade-off by reducing high school by one year while leaving the total instructional time unchanged. Employing administrative data on all high school graduates in 2002-2013 in Germany, we exploit both temporal and regional variation in the implementation of the reform and study the overall effectiveness of this reform. We find that compressing the high school track by one year reduces the mean high school graduation age by about 10 months. The probability to repeat a grade level in the course of high school increases by 21 percent (3 percentage points), peaking in the final three years before graduation. However, the high school graduation rate is not affected. The results indicate the reform's success in reducing the graduation age, though it stays behind its potential benefits for labour markets and social security schemes because of higher grade repetition rates.
Subjects: 
G12
G8
graduation age
grade repetition
grade retention
graduation rates
learning intensity
diff-in-diff
human capital
instructional time
JEL: 
I28
J18
D04
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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