News

December 2025

Post on After Babel: Strong Public Support to Restrict Social Media for Children in Germany

In our post on After Babel, we report on our research showing that a huge majority of adults in Germany favors a minimum age for social media, and even adolescents themselves see harm from social media.

Strong Public Support to Restrict Social Media for Children in Germany (with K. Wedel, V. Freundl, and F. Pfaehler). In: afterbabel.com, 16.12.2025

€21 Trillion in Additional Economic Output through Better Education

Recently, the education ministers of three federal states have formulated measurable goals for better education by 2035 across party lines: 50% fewer students who do not meet the minimum standards in German and mathematics (ensuring minimum education), 20% more who meet the standard requirements (raising the level of education), and 30% more who meet the optimal standards (promoting peak performance). How would achieving these educational policy goals affect the economy? Empirical economic research shows a close association between the educational achievement of the population and economic growth. In a projection model, we quantify how much additional economic output would be generated over the lifetime of a child born today if the educational goals were achieved. For Germany, the value of these improvements amounts to nearly €21 trillion in additional gross domestic product (GDP). This corresponds to almost five times the current annual GDP or 10% of the GDP discounted over the entire period. For the individual federal states, the additional GDP is between 3.5 and 7.6 times the current GDP. These economic returns illustrate how worthwhile it is for policymakers to prioritize improving educational outcomes. 

Volkswirtschaftliche Erträge besserer Bildung: Projektionen aktueller Bildungsziele für Deutschland und die Bundesländer (with K. Werkmeister). ifo Schnelldienst digital 6 (25), 2025 

New Working Paper: Training and Retiring as Adjust Mechanisms to Trade and Technology Shocks 

How do firms and workers adjust to trade and technology shocks? We analyze two mechanisms that have received little attention: training that upgrades skills and early retirement that shifts adjustment costs to public pension systems. We combine novel data on training participation and early retirement in German local labor markets with established measures of exposure to trade competition and robot adoption. Results indicate that negative trade shocks reduce training — particularly in manufacturing — while robot exposure increases training — particularly in indirectly affected services. Both shocks raise early retirement among manufacturing workers. Structural change thus induces both productivity-enhancing and productivity-reducing responses, challenging simple narratives of labor market adaptation and highlighting the scope for policy to promote adjustment mechanisms conducive to aggregate productivity.

Training or Retiring? How Labor Markets Adjust to Trade and Technology Shocks (with A. Bertermann, W. Dauth, and J. Suedekum). CESifo Working Paper 12240, November 2025 [post: X Bluesky LinkedIn]

Contribution to Political Economy Blog  

Leistungsniveau und Chancengerechtigkeit in der Bildung: Fundament für wirtschaftlichen Wohlstand und Teilhabe” in: Blog politische Ökonomie, 30.10.2025

Prosperity through Education: Interview on the ÖAW/Statistik Austria Lecture

Wohlstand durch Bildung. Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, www.oeaw.ac.at, 16.10.2025

Keynote in Oslo

I gave a keynote lecture on "Out-of-School Learning: New Insights from Subtitling, Patience, Mentoring, and Cognitive Aging" at the 3rd Workshop on Education Economics and Policy (WEEP) in Oslo.

Forthcoming in the Journal of Human Resources: Compulsory Religious Education in School Affects Students’ Adult Lives

We study whether compulsory religious education in schools affects students’ religiosity as adults. We exploit the staggered termination of compulsory religious education across German states in models with state and cohort fixed effects. Using three different datasets, we find that a reform abolishing compulsory religious education significantly reduced the religiosity of affected students in adulthood. It also reduced the religious actions of personal prayer, church-going, and church membership. Beyond religious attitudes, and consistent with a shift towards worldly norms and economic activities, the reform led to higher labor-market participation and earnings. By contrast, the reform did not affect ethical and political values or non-religious school outcomes.

Can Schools Change Religious Attitudes? Evidence from German State Reforms of Compulsory Religious Education (with B. Arold and L. Zierow). Journal of Human Resources, forthcoming [X Bluesky LinkedIn tweet1]

NBER Digest: Movie Subtitles and English Language Acquisition 

The NBER Digest covers our work on movie subtitles and English language acquisition.  

ÖAW/Statistik Austria Lectures at the Austrian Academy of Sciences

At the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), I had the pleasure of giving the ÖAW/Statistik Austria Lectures on the topic of “Education and prosperity: The knowledge capital of nations and how to increase it."

Education Policy Forum 2025 "Education in Times of Transformation and Occupational Change"

Together with colleagues from the Leibniz Education Research Network (LERN), I organized the Education Policy Forum 2025 in Berlin on October 1 on the topic of "Education in times of transformation and occupational change" and gave the introductory lecture.

ifo Education Survey 2025: What Adolescents and Adults Think about Social Media

The ifo Education Survey 2025 focuses on social media: 78% of adolescents and 58% of adults spend more than an hour a day on social media during the week. However, 47% of adults would prefer to live in a world without social media. In contrast, 68% of adolescents  would prefer to live in a world with social media. Clear majorities in both groups believe that social media has a negative impact on the mental and physical health of children and adolescents, their attention span, and their academic performance. An overwhelming majority of 85% of adults are in favor of a minimum age of 16 for social media. Even among adolescents, a relative majority of 47% are in favor of this. 59% of adults support a ban on cell phones in elementary schools during breaks and 64% during lessons; in secondary schools, the figures are 49% and 63% respectively. Among adolescents, the values are only slightly lower. 82% of adolescents and 50% of adults use artificial intelligence for school or work purposes. 66% of adolescents and 46% of adults are in favor of teaching how to use AI in the classroom.

 Selected media coverage: tagesschau.de, spiegel.de, zeit.de, Süddeutsche Zeitung, FAZ, Handelsblatt, Welt, ZDF heute show, Das Erste brisant, 3sat nano, BR24, SWR Aktuell, Bildung.Table, Wiarda-Blog, u.v.a.

Zwischen Likes und Lernen: Was Jugendliche und Erwachsene über Social Media denken; Ergebnisse des ifo Bildungsbarometers 2025 (with K. Wedel, V. Freundl, and F. Pfaehler). ifo Schnelldienst 78 (9): 37-57, 2025 [post: X Bluesky LinkedIn]

In_equality Podcast of the University of Konstanz: How Fair Is Our Education System?

In the In_equality Podcast of the University of Konstanz, I spoke with Gabriele Spilker and Marius Busemeyer about the causes and consequences of educational inequality in Germany. 

Annual Review of Economics Article Published

My review on multidimensional skills and earnings is now published open access in the Annual Review of Economics. 

Skills and Earnings: A Multidimensional Perspective on Human Capital. Annual Review of Economics 17: 397-425, 2025 [post: X Bluesky LinkedIn] 

RFBerlin Research Fellow

I have been invited to join the RFBerlin network as a Research Fellow.  

New Working Paper: TV Subtitling Boosts English-Language Skills

The development of English-language skills, a near necessity in today’s global economy, is heavily influenced by historical national decisions about whether to subtitle or dub TV content. While prior studies of language acquisition have focused on schools, we show the overwhelming influence of out-of-school learning. We identify the causal effect of subtitling in a difference-in-differences specification that compares English to math skills in European countries that do and do not use subtitles. We find a large positive effect of subtitling on English-language skills of over one standard deviation. The effect is robust to accounting for linguistic similarity, economic incentives to learn English, and cultural protectiveness. Consistent with oral TV transmission, the effect is larger for listening and speaking skills than for reading. 

Out-of-School Learning: Subtitling vs. Dubbing and the Acquisition of Foreign-Language Skills (with F. Baumeister and E.A. Hanushek). NBER Working Paper 33984 / CESifo Working Paper 11981 / IZA Discussion Paper 17991, July 2025  [post: X Bluesky LinkedIn] 

International Economic Policy Lecture at the University of Würzburg

On July 7, I gave the International Economic Policy Lecture at the University of Würzburg on "Knowledge and Prosperity: Education as Key for our Future".

Forthcoming in the Economic Journal: Paper on Patience and Regional Differences in Educational Achievement using Facebook Data

Decisions to invest in human capital depend on people’s time preferences. This paper shows that differences in patience are closely related to substantial subnational differences in educational achievement, leading to new perspectives on longstanding within-country disparities. We use social-media data – Facebook interests – to construct novel regional measures of patience within Italy and the United States. The approach is first validated with a cross-country analysis of patience and Facebook interests. We then show that patience is strongly positively associated with student achievement across regions in both countries, accounting for three-quarters of the achievement variation across Italian regions and one-third across U.S. states. The finding is confirmed in an identification strategy employing variation in ancestry countries of the current population of U.S. states. Results hold for six other countries with more limited regional achievement data.

Patience and Subnational Differences in Human Capital: Regional Analysis with Facebook Interests (with E.A. Hanushek, L. Kinne, and P. Sancassani). Economic Journal, forthcoming [post: X Bluesky LinkedIn tweet1] 

Executive Committee of the European Association of Labour Economists (EALE)

I have been elected into the Executive Committee of the European Association of Labour Economists (EALE). 

Excellence Cluster "TransforM"

TransforM – the Munich Center for Transformative Technologies and Societal Change was chosen as one of the Excellence Clusters funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). I am a Principal Investigator of this interdisciplinary social science cluster coordinated by the Technical University Munich for 2026-2032. The aim is to better understand how new technologies transform the society and the economy. 

Multidimensional Skills on LinkedIn Profiles: New Working Paper

We measure human capital using the self-reported skill sets of nearly 9 million U.S. college graduates from professional profiles on LinkedIn. We aggregate skill strings into 48 clusters of general, occupation-specific, and managerial skills. Multidimensional skills can account for several important labor-market patterns. First, the number and composition of skills are systematically related to measures of human-capital investment such as education and work experience. The number of skills increases with experience, and the average age-skill profile closely resembles the well-established concave age-earnings profile. Second, workers who report more skills, especially specific and managerial ones, hold higher-paid jobs. Skill differences account for more earnings variation than detailed measures of education and experience. Third, we document a sizable gender gap in skills. While women and men report nearly equal numbers of skills shortly after college graduation, women’s skill count increases more slowly with age subsequently. A simple quantitative exercise shows that women’s slower skill accumulation can be fully accounted for by reduced work hours associated with motherhood. The resulting gender differences in skills rationalize a substantial proportion of the gender gap in job-based earnings. 

Multidimensional Skills on LinkedIn Profiles: Measuring Human Capital and the Gender Skill Gap (with D. Dorn, F. Schoner, M. Seebacher, and L. Simon). CESifo Working Paper 11846 / IZA Discussion Paper 17896 / CEPR Discussion Paper 20258, May 2025 [post: X Bluesky LinkedIn]

Contribution in Interview Book "Justice"

Ist unser Bildungssystem gerecht? In: N. Goldschmidt, R. Kirchdörfer, D. Deißner (eds.), Gerechtigkeit: Wie wir unsere Gesellschaft zusammenhalten, Freiburg: Herder, 113-124, 2025

Educational Achievement through Commitment: New Report of the Expert Council on Education 

After rising previously, in recent years the performance level of students in Germany has fallen back below the level seen during the PISA shock in 2000. Only about one-third of this decline can be explained by changes in the composition of the student body. The Expert Council on Education analyzes the reasons for the renewed downward trend and calls for more binding commitments throughout the education system. In addition to insufficient support for the core competencies of all learners, the lack of nationwide comparability of educational outcomes and changes in parenting practices are also cited as possible explanations for the sharp decline in performance. The Expert Council on Education identifies solutions for how all those responsible can sustainably increase commitment to education at all stages of the educational system. Based on an empirically based assessment of the current situation, it derives concrete recommendations for action for political decision-makers.

Selected interviews in the media: spiegel.de, br.de, BR TV Rundschau, Rheinische Post

Bildungsleistung durch Verbindlichkeit. Gutachten des Aktionsrats Bildung. Münster: Waxmann, 2025

Short Article on Cognitive Skills and Age

Bisherige Studien gehen davon aus, dass kognitive Fähigkeiten spätestens ab dem 30. Lebensjahr nachlassen. Einzigartige deutsche Längsschnittdaten zu Kompetenzen zeigen ein anderes Bild: Kognitive Fähigkeiten nehmen im Durchschnitt bis in die Vierzigerjahre stark zu, bevor sie in den Bereichen Lesen und Schreiben leicht und beim Rechnen stärker abnehmen. Darüber hinaus gehen sie im höheren Alter nur bei Personen zurück, die ihre Kompetenzen wenig nutzen. Maßnahmen zum Erhalt von kognitiven Fähigkeiten, wie lebenslanges Lernen auch am Arbeitsplatz, sollten daher in Politik, Wirtschaft und Bevölkerung besondere Beachtung finden.

Previous studies have assumed that cognitive skills decline from the age of 30 at the latest. Unique German longitudinal data on skills paint a different picture: on average, cognitive skills increase significantly until the mid-40s, before declining slightly in literacy and more sharply in numeracy. Furthermore, they only decline in old age in people who make little use of their skills. Measures to maintain cognitive skills, such as lifelong learning in the workplace, should therefore be given special attention in politics, business, and among the general population.

Kognitive Fähigkeiten können durch regelmäßige Anwendung im Alter erhalten bleiben (with E.A. Hanushek, L. Kinne, and F. Witthöft). ifo Schnelldienst 78 (5): 58-63, 2025

(also published in: DIW Wochenbericht 92 (20): 289-294, 2025) 

Interview on Occupuational Orientation

Zum Stellenwert der Berufsorientierung. Berufsorientierung plus 1/2025: 16-17, 2025

Review on Multidimensional Skills and Earnings Forthcoming in the Annual Review of Economics

The multitude of tasks performed in the labor market requires skills in many dimensions. Traditionally, human capital has been proxied primarily by educational attainment. However, an expanding body of literature highlights the importance of various skill dimensions for success in the labor market. This article examines the returns to cognitive, personality, and social skills, which are three important dimensions of basic skills. Recent advances in text analysis of online job postings and professional networking platforms offer novel methods for assessing a wider range of applied skill dimensions and their labor market relevance. Synthesis and integration of the evidence of the relationship between multidimensional skills and earnings, including the matching of skill supply and demand, will enhance our understanding of the role of human capital in the labor market.

Skills and Earnings: A Multidimensional Perspective on Human Capital. Annual Review of Economics, forthcoming

VoxEU Column on How Cognitive Skills Change with Age

Use it or lose it: How cognitive skills change with age (with E.A. Hanushek, L. Kinne, and F. Witthöft). VoxEU.org, 12.4.2025

The Guardian Science Weekly Podcast: "Use It or Lose It: How to Sharpen Your Brain as You Age"

I talked to The Guardian Science Weekly Podcast about our paper on age and cognitive skills. 

Podcast "Explain the World": The More Educated, the Richer?  

I spoke to Andreas Sator in episode 339 of his podcast "Explain the world". About the huge return to education for individuals – and the major role that education plays in the prosperity of nations. And how we can improve the education system for everyone. A two-hour "deep dive".

Interview on our New Science Advances Paper in Die Zeit

So bleibt Ihr Gehirn 25. Die Zeit, 6.3.2025, No. 10, p. 36, 2025

New Paper in Science Advances:  Age and Cognitive Skills: Use It or Lose It

Cross-sectional age-skill profiles suggest that cognitive skills start declining by age 30 if not earlier. If accurate, such age-driven skill losses pose a major threat to the human capital of societies with rapidly aging populations. We estimate actual age-skill profiles from individual changes in literacy and numeracy skills at different ages. We use the unique German longitudinal component of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC-L) that retested a large representative sample of adults after 3-4 years. Our empirical approach separates age from cohort effects and corrects for measurement error from reversion to the mean. Two main results emerge. First, average skills increase strongly into the forties before decreasing slightly in literacy and more strongly in numeracy. Second, skills decline at older ages only for those with below-average skill usage. White-collar and higher-educated workers with above-average usage show increasing skills even beyond their forties. Women have larger skill losses at older age, particularly in numeracy.

Selected media coverage: The74, BBC Science Focus, The Guardian Science Weekly, Financial Times, Die Zeit, Les Echos, Corriere della Serra, MSN, ORF Science, PsyPost, Medium, wissenschaft.de, SINC, X, Minkorrekt, NÖÖRDS - Der Podcast. 

Age and Cognitive Skills: Use It or Lose It (with E.A. Hanushek, L. Kinne, and F. Witthöft). Science Advances 11 (10): eads1560, 2025 [post: X Bluesky LinkedIn]

Improving Educational Performance, Increasing Equal Opportunities – Contribution on the Federal Election 

My contribution to ifo's economic policy reform proposals for Germany for the 2025 federal election: The educational performance of German students is declining, and educational inequality is high. Yet educational performance is a decisive factor for economic prosperity. Reform proposals for a higher level of performance include a clear focus on teaching basic skills, ensuring educational quality through annual nationwide tests, giving schools more freedom of action, and making federalism and administration more effective. Proposals for greater equality of opportunity include providing targeted support to schools in challenging areas, helping disadvantaged children through tutoring and mentoring programs, expanding early childhood education opportunities for disadvantaged children and their families, and testing and promoting language development at an early stage.

Bildungsleistungen verbessern, Chancengerechtigkeit erhöhen. ifo Schnelldienst 78 (1): 27-32, 2025