Essays on Education and Other Human Capital Related Policies

The thesis deals with five different human capital-related problems and tries to approach these problems from an empirical point of view. Each essay includes an own introduction and a short conclusion. All parts of the thesis are self-contained and can be read separately. The first essay entitled \"Size matters. The Relevance and Hicksian Surplus of Preferred College Class Size\" deals with the impact of class size on student evaluations of instructor performance using a sample of approximately 1,400 economics classes held at the university of Munich. Secondly, the data of a representative survey is used to estimate the willinngness-to-pay for preferred class size. Based on these findings and data, we try to give some evidence on what factors determine students\'' preferences for small class size with special interest to gender differences in the second essay entitled \"What determines Students Preferences for Small Class Size\". \"Total Instructional Time Exposure and Student Achievement: An Extreme Bound Analysis based on German state-level variation\" mainly deals with instructional time shortfall and student performance variation over the different German states using extreme bound analysis. Thereby the techniques also overcomes an error-in-variables problem and implied misinterpretation of existing studies that disregard the fact of learning being a cumulative process by relying on rather poor proxies for instructional time. In the essay \"No State Left Behind? Public education, accountability, and hybrid forms of federal governance\" the focus lies on announcement effects of the respective PISA results on election polls of federal government and federal states in Germany with regard to differences in relative performance in German states. In consideration of the results, we draw a policy conclusion about the distribution of authorities in a public education system between a federal government and federal states. Finally the last essay entitled \"A Re-examination of the Role of Gender in Determining Digital Piracy Behavior\" concentrates on the gender-gap in determining digital piracy behavior using a representative survey with more than 200 participants. In contrast to existing studies, we sharply discriminate between the frequency and the extent of pirating digital media