This paper investigates the long-run consequences of a later school entry for personality traits. For identification, we exploit the statutory cutoff rules for school enrollment in Germany within a regression discontinuity design. We find that relatively older school starters have persistently lower levels of neuroticism in adulthood. This effect is entirely driven by women, which has important implications for gender gaps in the labor market, as women typically score significantly higher on neuroticism at all stages of life, which puts them at a disadvantage. Our results suggest that family decisions regarding compliance with enrollment cutoffs may have lasting implications for gender gaps in socio-emotional skills.

This paper studies the cyclicality of general vs. specific skill investments. Using administrative data on higher education and the German apprenticeship market between 1998 and 2018, I show that local labor market shocks at high school graduation reduce college attainment. Risk-averse and patient students remain in general skill tracks, while others shift toward vocational education. Low-achieving young men increase their expected relative returns to vocational education, whereas high-SES students shift toward general skills. These findings contrast the conventional wisdom of countercyclical college-going when specific skills serve as an outside option and highlight how economic shocks reinforce inequality.

Typical of the European context large quality differences have existed across fields rather than German universities historically. We use a student choice model to show how this feature may generate information frictions, resulting in inefficient matching and welfare losses to the present day. A key theoretical result is that higher average distances between high schools and colleges of freshmen indicate better matching at the market level. In a second step, we combine an ordinal tier ranking published by the German newspaper ``Die Zeit’’, which in a staggered way increased readily available information on field-specific quality, with X cohorts of register data on freshmen. Difference-in-differences estimates that exploit field-specific information shocks within universities over time show that a top-tier ranking increases the distance students travel to a program by 7%. To quantify the implied welfare gains from this improved matching, in a third step, we show that graduates from top-tier programs have over 14% higher earnings in their first job. We moreover examine empirically implications for inequality and Germany’s lost potential.