Education is a main cause of health inequality because it influences health behavior as well as structural conditions that impact health, such as living and working conditions. We examine how different educational groups reacted to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany by looking at health-related behaviorsocial distancing, increased hygiene, and mask wearingas well as changes in working conditionswork from home, reduced working hours, and not workingas a structural indicator that can mitigate the risk of infection. More than three quarters of respondents in all educational groups complied with recommended social distancing and hand hygiene behaviors, and differences by education did not exceed ten percentage points. Regarding working conditions, highly educated respondents had a likelihood of over 45 percent to work from home during the pandemic. This number decreased to 17 and 11 percent for those with intermediate and low levels of education, respectively. It seems that education-based inequalities in the risk of infection with COVID-19 do not primarily stem from differences in health behavior but rather from structural causes, that is, inability to practice social distancing at work.

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Research has consistently shown that social origin has exceptionally strong effects on educational outcomes in Germany. Aside from primary effects of social origin, there are especially strong secondary effects. The reasons for these differences in educational decisions when academic abilities are held constant are not clear. Several theoretical approaches claim to explain the association between social origin and educational decisions. These approaches are rational choice theory and different versions of bounded rationality, theories based on the relevance of values, social norms, and reference groups, social capital theory, and cultural capital theory. However, the necessary data for simultaneously judging the relative merits of these approaches is not yet available. In particular, there is a lack of consistent measures across all relevant educational stages over the life course. Longitudinal data would be a great advantage for determining the causal effect of the factors under consideration. At present, available data is restricted to a single educational decision and either cross-sectional or restricted to locally defined samples. Pillar 3 of the German National Educational Panel Study aims to measure the relevant factors for explaining educational decisions and inequality in educational opportunity in all relevant stages over the life course.

Even though social class is at least as predictive of educational achievement as ethnicity in virtually all developed countries, experimental research on discrimination in education has overwhelmingly focused on the latter. We investigate both ethnic discrimination and social class discrimination by elementary school teachers in Germany. We conceptualize discrimination as causal effects of signals and use directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to disentangle ethnic from social class discrimination. In our experiment, we asked randomly sampled elementary school teachers who teach immigrants to evaluate an essay written by a fourthgrader. Employing a 2 × 2 × 3 factorial design, we varied essay quality, child's gender, and ethnic and socioeconomic background using names as stimuli. We do not find evidence for discrimination in grading. However, our findings for teachers' expectations of children's future performance suggest a discriminatory bias along the lines of both ethnicity and social class. The effect is conditional on essay quality-it only holds true for the better essay. We interpret our findings as evidence for models that highlight situational moderators such as the richness of information and ambiguity-e.g., statistical discrimination-but as evidence against simpler models of ingroup-favoritism or outgroup derogation, e.g., social identity theory or taste discrimination.

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