Education & Equal Opportunities

What makes a good teacher? This is one of the central questions in the economics of education. General teacher qualifications, such as education level or advanced degrees, tend to be poor predictors of teacher quality. Instead, some studies have shown that subject-specific qualifications predict teacher quality better. However, the vast majority of such studies are based on data from the United States. It is therefore unclear to what extent the findings can be generalized to other nations, as teacher education programs vary widely across countries. The lack of international evidence is particularly problematic for developing economies, which would arguably benefit most from improving student achievement.

The analysis shows that data skills are required in many job advertisements in Germany and are becoming more relevant. This is a positive sign for the data economy in Germany, as companies increasingly realize the potential of data and try to implement it in their own operations. However, a growing demand for employees with data skills poses challenges for companies in the future in view of the existing skills gap, especially in digitalization professions. Policymakers should intervene by, for example, taking measures that make it easier for companies to recruit foreign workers.

In this article, the authors provide new evidence on regional income inequality in Germany, using tabulated income tax statistics for the period 1998-2016. Other than related work on regional income inequality in Germany which analyzes income or wages at the county level, we can characterize inequality at the municipality level. As there currently exist 401 counties in Germany, but more than 10,000 municipalities, our analysis is conducted at a much more fine-grained level.

Greater exposure to evolution teaching not only improves students’ knowledge of evolution by the time they graduate from high school, but it also enhances their belief in evolution in adulthood. What is more, the reforms affect high-stakes life decisions, namely the probability of choosing a career in life sciences.

How successful have efforts been to socially integrate Syrian migrants in Germany? What factors influence social integration? Together with researchers from Harvard and Meta, we address these questions in a new research paper working with de-identified data from Facebook.