Thome, Boris, Friederike Hertweck & Stefan Conrad, 2025. Predicting Perceived Text Complexity: The Role of Person-Related Features in Profile-Based Models. Journal of Educational Data Mining, 17(1), 276–307.
Hertweck, Friederike & Judith Lehner, 2025. The gender gap in STEM: (Female) teenagers’ ICT skills and subsequent career paths. PLoS ONE, 20, 1, e0308074.
Thome, Boris, Friederike Hertweck, Lukas Jonas & Serife Yasar, 2024. Automated Extraction of Icon-based Tables, GI-Edition Lecture Notes in Informatics, pp. 2003-2005.
Thome, Boris, Friederike Hertweck & Stefan Conrad, 2024. Determining Perceived Text Complexity: An Evaluation of German Sentences Through Student Assessments, Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2024), pp. 714-721.
Bachmann, Ronald & Friederike Hertweck, 2023. The Gender Gap in Digital Literacy: A Cohort Analysis for Germany, Applied Economics Letters, forthcoming.
Bachmann, Ronald, Friederike Hertweck, Rebecca Kamb, Judith Lehner, Malte Niederstadt & Christian Rulff, 2022. Digitale Kompetenzen in Deutschland, Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftspolitik, 71(3), pp. 266-286.
Hertweck, Friederike, Lukas Jonas, Melissa Kistner & Deborah Maffia, 2024. Study Effort in Higher Education: Field Experimental Evidence with Administrative and Tracking Data from Germany. AER Registration: AEARCTR-0011049. Ruhr Economic Paper No. 1138.
Demir, Gökay, Friederike Hertweck, Malte Sandner \& Ipek Yükselen, 2024. Coworker Networks from Student Jobs: A Flying Start at Labor Market Entry? IZA Discussion Paper No. 17541 and Ruhr Economic Paper No. 1127.
Hertweck, Friederike & Serife Yasar, 2024. Effects of college openings on local youths. Ruhr Economic Paper No. 1075.
Hertweck, F., 2022. Student performance in Large Cohorts: Evidence from Unexpected Enrollment Shocks. Ruhr Economic Paper No. 984. R&R at Economics of Education Review.
Hertweck, Friederike, Philip Raatz, & Katharina Vollmer, 2025. Das FDZ Ruhr als Vetrauensstelle. Bausteine Forschungsdatenmanagement, 2025(1), pp. 1--8.
Hertweck, Friederike & Kerstin Schneider, 2025. Hochschule. In: Küpker, M. & A. Winkler (eds.), Bildungsbericht Ruhr 2024: Bildung in der Region gemeinsam gestalten. Essen: Ruhr Futur & Regionalverband Ruhr.
Hertweck, Friederike, 2024. Datengestützt zum Erfolg: Internationale Beispiele für eine evidenzbasierte Transformation des Bildungssystems. Düsseldorf: Vodafone Foundation.
Joint panel discussion with Anne Sliwka and Alexander Brand organized by the Vodafone Foundation. Watch the video on YouTube (in German only)
Hertweck, Friederike, Lukas Jonas, Boris Thome & Serife Yasar, 2024. RWI-UNI-SUBJECTS: Complete records of all subjects across German HEIs (1971-1996), RWI Materialien.
Hertweck, Friederike & Kerstin Schneider, 2024. Bildungskrise – wieso bessere Bildungsdaten notwendig sind. RWI Impact Note, February 2024.
Hertweck, Friederike, Ingo E. Isphording, Sönke H. Matthewes, Kerstin Schneider & C. Katharina Spieß, 2023. Stellungnahme aus dem Verein für Socialpolitik: Für besseren Datenzugang im Bereich Bildung, RWI Materialien No. 159 & RatSWD Working Paper No. 282.
Bauer, Thomas & Friederike Hertweck, 2023. Pisa-Schock: Nur die Spitze des bildungspolitischen Eisbergs. Unstatistik des Monats Dezember, 14.12.2023.
Hertweck, Friederike, 2023. Digitale Kompetenzen von Mädchen beeinflussen deren Berufswahl. RWI Impact Note, November 2023.
Bachmann, Ronald, Friederike Hertweck, Rebecca Kamb, Judith Lehner, Malte Niederstadt & Christian Rulff, 2021. Diskussionspapier: Digitale Kompetenzen in Deutschland – eine Bestandsaufnahme. RWI Materialien #150.
RWI (2021), Grundschulunterricht in Zeiten von Corona – Auswertungen einer Elternbefragung in NRW. Project team: Philipp Breidenbach, Friederike Hertweck, Lisa Höckel, Lukas Hörnig, Sandra Schaffner, Michael Schweitzer.
Run with the hare and hunt with the hounds: Colleges as platforms in the market for higher education (paper available on request)
A college is a physical space where students and professors interact. Several peer and interaction effects arise on campus - not only among students but also among professors. This paper incorporates all interaction effects in a theoretical model by treating colleges as intermediaries in two-sided markets. Students form one side of the market, pay tuition fees and demand services from the college. Professors, who engage in teaching and research and get paid by the college, build the other side of the market. The model can predict empirically observed patterns in higher education that contradict standard economic theory, for instance that an increase in tuition fees at a particular college is sometimes associated with an increase in demand for that institution. Moreover, the model can show how pricing policies change if quality restrictions such as a minimum SAT score are required and how this affects teaching and research quality. In an empirical application, I show how students affect professorial research with yet unused data from German funding providers. Thereby, this paper not only provides a new way of modeling higher education institutions and markets but also adds to our empirical understanding of spillovers from students on research output.
The effect of college rankings on educational choice (with Mirco Tonin, Robbie Maris, and Michael Vlassopoulos - paper available on request)
College rankings have been established over the past decades as an information and marketing tool all over the world. While rankings are heavily criticized for their methodology and for being prone to manipulation, research has shown that higher-ranked institutions receive more applications than institutions at the bottom end. Yet, it is neither clear whether rankings affect an applicant's ultimate university choice nor whether some groups of applicants rely more on rankings than others. This paper fills this gap by providing evidence on the link between college rankings and an individual's educational choice. Our analysis is based on more than 35 million college applications to UK colleges since 2007. Data have been provided by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) and cover the universe of applications to UK institutions over more than a decade. We link the application data to League Table data provided by several publishing companies. The results show that rankings matter beyond their original purpose of summarizing information: Students base their college choice on rankings if they got accepted by two institutions of very similar quality.
Information Frictions in School Track Choice - Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment (with Pia Schilling, Moritz Welz, and Sven Werenbeck-Ueding)
In this study, we analyze whether linguistic barriers and a lack of knowledge about the German school system hinders immigrant parents from making an informed choice about their children’s school track. As part of a randomized control trial in a large German state in the school year 2023/24, parents of fourth-graders are provided a (multilingual) mobile application containing useful information on track choice. Different versions of the App will be randomly assigned to elementary schools. AER Registration: AEARCTR-0011821.
The effects of computer science on local labor market (with Shihang Hou, Britta Jensen, and Lukas Jonas - paper available on request)
We employ an event-study approach to analyze the local labour market effects of introducing tertiary computer science courses within commuting zones in Germany between 1980 and 2017, accounting for initial differences in the prevalence of computer science in the commuting zone by controlling for computer science employment in 1975-79. We combine a novel dataset on the records of academic courses offered in Germany with individual-level administrative data on every employee in computer science occupations and establishment-level data on non-computer science employment. Introducing computer science courses significantly increases the number of employed computer scientists in the treated region, with the supply effect amplifying over time. However, this increased supply is primarily absorbed by the computer science industry, with minimal dispersion into other industries. Despite the substantial increase in supply, wages for computer scientists remain unaffected after accounting for age and gender composition. We find negligible spillover effects on employment and wages of non-computer scientists, although we find positive effects on establishment creation in non-computer science industries. Finally, we show that the effects do not depend on the type of higher education institution at which computer science is offered.