Marcus, J., & Rudakov, V. The impact of a school entry cut-off reform on school enrollment and grade repetition
School entry age policies involve a fundamental trade-off: policies aimed at earlier enrolment may accelerate educational trajectories and labour market entry, but may also trigger non-compliance with school entry rules and adverse early school outcomes, including slower school progression. This paper evaluates a reform postponing school entry cut-off dates in Germany, allowing some children to start school younger, and examines effects on enrolment behaviour and grade repetition. Using administrative state-level data and individual-level German Socio-Economic Panel data for the 2000–2016 school entry cohorts, we exploit the staggered adoption across states in a difference-in-differences framework. The results suggest that the reform did not fully achieve its intended objectives. Although it led to a modest decline in the average school starting age, it also triggered substantial behavioural responses including higher rates of late enrolment, lower rates of early enrolment, and increased grade repetition. Overall, the results suggest that non-compliance limits the effectiveness of school-entry cut-off reforms in achieving their intended policy objectives.
Rudakov, V. The Impact of Sanctions on Human Development and Research Output
This paper investigates the impact of sanctions on human development and research output in sanctioned countries. Using data from the Global Sanctions Database combined with standard international indicators of human development, democracy, and economic performance, we estimate two-way fixed effects and event-study difference-in-differences models to identify both average and dynamic effects. To address endogeneity concerns, we apply entropy balancing and compare the effects of sanctions with those of sanction threats, allowing us to distinguish the impact of sanctions themselves from that of the underlying triggering events. We further account for staggered treatment timing using alternative difference-in-differences estimators. We find that sanctions significantly reduce Human development index (HDI), primarily through declines in expected years of schooling and income, and exert a persistent negative effect on research output. The impact on HDI emerges shortly after sanctions are imposed but dissipates over time, whereas research output deteriorate with a delay and remain depressed for more than a decade. In contrast, sanction threats not followed by implementation have largely insignificant or much smaller effects, suggesting that the observed declines are driven by imposed sanctions rather than by the underlying events. Overall, the findings suggest that sanctions have substantial adverse effects on human development and persistent negative effects on research capacity, highlighting a trade-off between their political objectives and their long-term costs for human development and knowledge production.