Research Interests 

Economics of Education, Public Economics, Applied Microeconomics, and Behavioral Economics.

Working Papers

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. R&R Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

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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