Publications

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.

This work proposes using the feature of large language models (LLMs) to learn about the "data bias" injected by diverse SDG classifications into bibliometric data by exploring five SDGs. We build a LLM that is fine-tuned in parallel by the diverse SDG classifications inscribed into the databases' SDG classifications. Our results show high sensitivity in model architecture, classified publications, fine-tuning process and natural language generation. The wide arbitrariness at different levels raises concerns about using LLM in research practice.

Nacaps, the National Academics Panel Study, is a new longitudinal study of doctoral candidates and doctorate holders in Germany funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The project aims at providing nationwide cross-sectional and longitudinal data on doctoral candidates and doctorate holders in Germany regarding their study conditions as well as their career trajectories within and outside of academia. The Nacaps study series apply a panel design to multiple cohorts. Nacaps 2018 is the first cohort in this series of studies. In 2019, all doctoral candidates registered at 53 higher education institutions [...] Full Abstract: https://doi.org/10.21249/DZHW:nac2018:2.0.0

This flyer on the prof*panel, the DZHW professors survey, provides an overview of the possible paths to a full professorship (tenured). This is supplemented by insights into the educational background depending on the type of professorship in our panel.

Reusing research data is an important part of research practice in the social and economic sciences. To find suitable data, researchers need functional search options. However, a comprehensive search for data is hampered by inconsistent or missing semantic indexing because different survey programs use their own terminology for documentation. In most cases, there is no link between the measured theoretical concepts and the variables. From the user's perspective, the fragmentation of data documentation hampers data retrieval and thus limits the research potential of existing data. The challenge, therefore, lies in the concept-oriented indexing of data. [...] Full Abstract: https://zenodo.org/records/11047523

In the Dutch academic system, PhD theses can be awarded with cum laude and at most 5% of all PhD graduates receive this selective distinction for their thesis. In this paper, we investigate whether there is gender bias in awarding cum laude, using data from one of the major Dutch research universities. A main result is that the set of PhD theses receiving cum laude on average do not have a higher quality than the best theses not getting cum laude. A second main result is that, after controlling for the quality of the PhD theses, women still have a substantially lower probability to receive cum laude. These results strongly suggest that the distribution of awards suffers from gender bias.