Skip to main content

Felix Weinhardt.

Felix Weinhardt

Associate

Expertise: economics of education, labour economics, spatial and social inequality, causal effects

Telephone:
+493089789691
Email:
weinhardt@europa-uni.de
Connect:
Twitter
Website
Links:
CEP Education

Biography

Felix Weinhardt obtained his PhD at the LSE in 2012 and is currently employed as full professor of public economics at the European University Viadrina and faculty of the Berlin School of Economics. He is interested in causes and consequences of social and spatial inequalities. As a result, his work focuses on human capital/education, labour supply, as well as real estate. He has published in leading, peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Current areas of research include:

  • Economics of education
  • Labour supply in ageing societies
  • Gender inequalities in market and non-market work
  • Causal analysis

Publications

CEP discussion papers
Random placement but real bias

Many studies exploit the random placement of individuals into groups such as schools or regions to estimate the effects of group-level variables on these individuals. Assuming a simple data generating process, we show th... Read more...

Marco Schmandt, Constantin Tielkes and Felix Weinhardt

22 December 2025

Journal article
Home broadband and human capital formation

Using administrative data from England, we estimate the effect of home broadband speed on student-level value-added test scores. Our primary estimation leverages jumps in connection quality between close neighbors across... Read more...

Jose Montalban, Rosa Sanchis-Guarner and Felix Weinhardt

01 October 2025

Journal article
Immigration, female labour supply and local cultural norms

We study the local evolution of female labour supply and cultural norms in West Germany in reaction to the sudden presence of East Germans who migrated to the West after reunification. These migrants grew up with high ra... Read more...

Jonas Jessen, Sophia Schmitz and Felix Weinhardt

01 April 2024

Blog
Do publicly funded autonomous schools improve education systems in the world?

In recent decades, many countries have established autonomous schools, which are publicly funded but can operate more independently than government-run schools. Natalie Irmert, Jan Bietenbeck, Linn Mattisson and Felix We... Read more...

Jan Bietenbeck, Natalie Irmert, Linn Mattisson and Felix Weinhardt

27 February 2024

CEP discussion papers
Home broadband and human capital formation

Using administrative data, we estimate the effect of home broadband speed on student-level value-added test scores. Our headline estimate relies on jumps in connection quality between close neighbours that occur across t... Read more...

Jose Montalban, Rosa Sanchis-Guarner and Felix Weinhardt

08 February 2024

Journal article
House price expectations

This study examines short-, medium-, and long-run price expectations in housing markets. At the heart of our analysis is the combination of data from a tailored in-person household survey, past sale offerings, satellite ... Read more...

Niklas Gohl, Peter Haan, Claus Michelsen and Felix Weinhardt

01 February 2024

CEP discussion papers
Autonomous schools, achievement and segregation

We study whether autonomous schools, which are publicly funded but can operate more independently than government-run schools, affect student achievement and school segregation across 15 countries over 16 years. Our trip... Read more...

Jan Bietenbeck, Natalie Irmert, Linn Mattisson and Felix Weinhardt

18 December 2023

Journal article
Class rank and long-run outcomes

This paper considers an unavoidable feature of the school environment, class rank. What are the long-run effects of a student's ordinal rank in elementary school? Using administrative data on all public-school students i... Read more...

Jeffrey T Denning, Richard Murphy and Felix Weinhardt

17 November 2023

Chapter
The Implications of Pupil Rank for Achievement

The significance of social interaction has become an increasingly important part of economic thought and models through the work on peer effects, social norms, and networks. Within this literature, a novel focus of ranki... Read more...

Richard Murphy and Felix Weinhardt

18 October 2023

Journal article
Working life and human capital investment: causal evidence from a pension reform

In this paper, we analyze if an increase in the working life leads to more human capital investment via on-the-job training. We obtain RDD-estimates from a sharp date-of-birth cut-off, generated by a pension reform that ... Read more...

Elisabeth Furstenau, Niklas Gohl, Peter Haan and Felix Weinhardt

01 October 2023

Journal article
Machine learning assists in increasing the time resolution of X-ray computed tomography applied to mineral precipitation in porous media

Many subsurface engineering technologies or natural processes cause porous medium properties, such as porosity or permeability, to evolve in time. Studying and understanding such processes on the pore scale is strongly a... Read more...

Holger Class, Johannes Hommel, Dongwon Lee, Joseph Piotrowski, Holger Steeb and Felix Weinhardt

29 June 2023

Journal article
Tuition fees and educational attainment

Following a landmark court ruling in 2005, more than half of Germany?s universities started charging tuition fees, which were later abolished in a staggered manner. We exploit the fact that even students who were already... Read more...

Jan Bietenbeck, Andreas Leibing, Jan Marcus and Felix Weinhardt

01 May 2023

Journal article
Information provision and postgraduate studies

This is the first paper to examine experimentally effects of information provision on beliefs about pecuniary and non-pecuniary returns of postgraduate education, enrolment intentions and realized enrolment. We find that... Read more...

Jan Berkes, Peter Frauke, C. Katharina Spiess and Felix Weinhardt

01 July 2022

CEP discussion papers
Tuition fees and educational attainment

Following a landmark court ruling in 2005, more than half of Germany's universities started charging tuition fees, which were subsequently abolished until 2015. We exploit the unusual lack of grandfathering in these poli... Read more...

Jan Bietenbeck, Andreas Leibing, Jan Marcus and Felix Weinhardt

16 March 2022

CEP discussion papers
House price expectations

This study examines short-, medium-, and long-run price expectations in housing markets. We derive and test six hypothesis about the incidence, formation, and relevance of price expectations. To do so, we use data from a... Read more...

Niklas Gohl, Peter Haan, Claus Michelsen and Felix Weinhardt

10 February 2022

Journal article
Long-run expectations of households

The rational expectations assumption, e.g. in life-cycle models and portfolio-choice models, prescribes that all actions are in line with a well-structured and unbiased system of expectations. In reality, justification a... Read more...

Christoph Breunig, Juliia Grabova, Peter Haan, Felix Weinhardt and Georg Weizsacker

01 September 2021

Journal article
Who teaches the teachers? A RCT of peer-to-peer observation and feedback in 181 schools

This paper evaluates a widely used, low stakes, teacher peer-to-peer observation and feedback program under Randomized Control Trial (RCT) conditions. Half of 181 volunteer primary schools in England were randomly select... Read more...

Richard Murphy, Felix Weinhardt and Gill Wyness

01 June 2021

CEP discussion papers
Working life and human capital investment

This paper provides a novel test of a key prediction of human capital theory that educational investment decisions depend on the length of the pay-off period. We obtain causal estimates by leveraging a unique reform of t... Read more...

Niklas Gohl, Peter Haan, Elisabeth Kurz and Felix Weinhardt

19 March 2021

Journal article
Top of the class: the importance of ordinal rank

This article establishes a new fact about educational production: ordinal academic rank during primary school has lasting impacts on secondary school achievement that are independent of underlying ability. Using data on ... Read more...

Richard Murphy and Felix Weinhardt

01 May 2020

CEP discussion papers
Who teaches the teachers? A RCT of peer-to-peer observation and feedback in 181 schools

It is well established that teachers are the most important in-school factor in determining student outcomes. However, to date there is scant robust quantitative research demonstrating that teacher training programs can ... Read more...

Richard Murphy, Felix Weinhardt and Gill Wyness

14 August 2018

Journal article
Neighbourhood turnover and teenage attainment

Theories about neighbours' influence on children's education that are based on social capital, cohesion, and disorganisation stress the importance of neighbourhood stability. This is because stability is regarded as nece... Read more...

Stephen Gibbons, Olmo Silva and Felix Weinhardt

01 August 2017

CentrePiece - The magazine of the Centre for Economic Performance
Faster broadband: are there any educational benefits?

Governments around the world are committing substantial public funds to upgrading their broadband infrastructure, partly in the hope of promoting education. Research findings by Rosa Sanchis-Guarner and colleagues raise ... Read more...

Benjamin Faber, Rosa Sanchis-Guarner and Felix Weinhardt

04 October 2016

SERC Discussion Papers
ICT and Education: Evidence from Student Home Addresses

Governments are making it a priority to upgrade information and communication technologies (ICT) with the aim to increase available internet connection speeds. This paper presents a new empirical strategy to estimate the... Read more...

Benjamin Faber, Rosa Sanchis-Guarner and Felix Weinhardt

06 October 2015

CEP discussion papers
ICT and education: evidence from student home addresses

Governments are making it a priority to upgrade information and communication technologies (ICT) with the aim to increase available internet connection speeds. This paper presents a new strategy to estimate the causal ef... Read more...

Benjamin Faber, Rosa Sanchis-Guarner and Felix Weinhardt

18 June 2015

SERC Discussion Papers
Neighbourhood Turnover and Teenage Attainment

Theories about neighbours? influence on children based on social capital, cohesion and disorganisation stress the importance of neighbourhood stability. However, amongst the vast number of studies on the effect of neighb... Read more...

Stephen Gibbons, Olmo Silva and Felix Weinhardt

14 August 2014

CentrePiece - The magazine of the Centre for Economic Performance
Everybody needs good neighbours?

There are large disparities between the achievements, behaviour and aspirations of children in different neighbourhoods ? but does this mean that the place where you grow up determines your later life outcomes? Steve Gib... Read more...

Stephen Gibbons, Olmo Silva and Felix Weinhardt

05 February 2014

CentrePiece - The magazine of the Centre for Economic Performance
In brief... Top of the class

Boys may be better off not going to the school with high-performing peers, according to research by Richard Murphy and Felix Weinhardt, which explores how much impact there is on later confidence and exam results from wh... Read more...

Richard Murphy and Felix Weinhardt

10 December 2013

CEP discussion papers
The importance of rank position

We find an individual?s rank within their reference group has effects on later objective outcomes. To evaluate the impact of local rank, we use a large administrative dataset tracking over two million students in England... Read more...

Richard Murphy and Felix Weinhardt

23 September 2013

SERC Discussion Papers
The Importance of Time Zone Assignment: Evidence from Residential Electricity Consumption

This paper presents the first nationwide empirical assessment of residential electricity use in response to the timing of daylight. Employing Geographical Information Systems (GIS) solar times of sunrise and sunset are c... Read more...

Felix Weinhardt

07 January 2013

Journal article
The good, the bad, and the average: evidence on ability peer effects in schools

We study ability peer effects in English secondary schools using data on four cohorts of students taking age-14 national tests and measuring peers' ability by prior achievements at age 11. Our identification is based on ... Read more...

Victor Lavy, Olmo Silva and Felix Weinhardt

01 April 2012

SERC Discussion Papers
Do Neighbours Affect Teenage Outcomes? Evidence from Neighbourhood Changes in England

In this paper, we use census data on several cohorts of secondary school students in England matched to detailed information on place of residence to investigate the effect of neighbours? background characteristics and p... Read more...

Stephen Gibbons, Olmo Silva and Felix Weinhardt

01 November 2010

CEE discussion papers
Do Neighbours Affect Teenage Outcomes? Evidence from Neighbourhood Changes in England

In this paper, we use census data on several cohorts of secondary school students in England matched to detailed information on place of residence to investigate the effect of neighbours? background characteristics and p... Read more...

Stephen Gibbons, Olmo Silva and Felix Weinhardt

01 November 2010

SERC Discussion Papers
Moving into the Projects: Social Housing Neighbourhoods and School Performance in England

This study estimates the effect of living in a very deprived neighbourhood, as identified by a high density of social housing, on the educational attainment of fourteen years old (9th grade) students in England. Neighbou... Read more...

Felix Weinhardt

01 February 2010

spacer