Does instructional time at school influence study time at university? Evidence from an instructional time reform

Jakob Schwerter, Nicolai Netz and Nicolas Hübner

Economics of Education Review, 2024, vol. 100, issue C

Abstract: Early-life environments can have long-lasting effects on individuals’ later life courses. Interestingly, research on the effects of school reforms has hardly adopted this perspective. Therefore, we investigate a staggered school reform that reduced the number of school years and increased weekly instructional time for secondary school students in most German federal states. We analyze this quasi-experiment in a difference-in-differences framework using nationally representative large-scale survey data on 69,513 students who attended university between 1998 and 2016. Using both TWFE and weighted-group ATT estimators, we find negative effects of reform exposure on hours spent attending classes and on self-study. Moreover, reform exposure increased the time gap between school completion and higher education entry. Our results support the view that research should examine unintended long-term effects of school reforms on individual life courses.

Keywords: G8 high school reform; Higher education; Study time; Long-term effect; Staggered difference-in-differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I2 I21 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775724000207
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:100:y:2024:i:c:s0272775724000207

DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2024.102526

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Education Review is currently edited by E. Cohn

More articles in Economics of Education Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().