Research Interests 

Applied Microeconomics, Economics of Education, and Behavioral Economics

Working Papers

Short-Term Events, Long-Term Friends? Freshman Orientation Peers and Academic Performance. CESifo Working Paper No. 11046, 2024. 

Many organizations use onboarding programs to assist newcomers with the transition process. Are brief social interactions during such programs sufficient to create lasting performance spillovers? Exploiting quasi-random assignment to groups of a two-day freshman orientation program for university students, I find that higher ability peers generate positive effects even three years later. A one SD increase in peer ability improves the academic performance of business administration students by 0.05 to 0.08 SD. I provide evidence that these effects result from the formation of lasting social ties, and that performance spillovers are moderated by the broader social environment of the organization.

Helping Students to Succeed - The Long-Term Effects of Soft Commitments and Reminders (with Oliver Himmler, Robert Jäckle, and Philipp Weinschenk). CESifo Working Paper No. 11001, 2024. 

To study whether a soft commitment device can help students succeed, we conduct a randomized field experiment and follow a cohort of tertiary students over six years. Students can commit to following their recommended study program structure, and they receive reminders each semester. This easily implementable, low-cost intervention is highly effective: it increases the five-year graduation rate (+15 percentage points) and reduces time to graduation (-0.42 semesters), driven by reduced dropout and an increase in credits obtained per semester. The effects are stronger for suspected procrastinators. A treatment only reminding students to follow the program structure has limited effects.

Relative Performance Feedback and Long-Term Tasks - Experimental Evidence from Higher Education (with Oliver Himmler and Robert Jäckle). CESifo Working Paper No. 10346, 2023.

We present first experimental evidence that relative performance feedback improves both the speed and quality with which challenging long-term tasks are completed. Providing university students with ongoing relative feedback on accumulated course credits, a measure of progress toward graduation, accelerates graduation by 0.12 SD, and also improves grades by 0.063 SD. Treatment effects are concentrated among students with medium pre-treatment graduation probabilities: when these students are informed about an above-average performance, their outcomes improve – otherwise their outcomes deteriorate. Combined with survey evidence, this pattern of results suggests that learning about own ability is a plausible mechanism.

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