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This paper aims to study the effect of family socioeconomic status (SES) on academic and labor market outcomes.

The authors used a rich data set of administrative records for test scores, individual background and adult earnings of a cohort of agents, covering a period spanning the agents' upper-secondary education and their early years in the labor market.

The authors find that students with the highest SES obtained a 1.5 standard deviations higher score in the college admission test than students who had the same academic outcomes in the eighth grade test but belong to the lowest SES. Similarly, among students that obtained the same scores in the college admission test, those with the highest SES earned monthly wages 0.7 standard deviations higher than those with the lowest SES.

The findings highlight that family socioeconomic background continues to influence outcomes during individuals’ upper secondary education and early years in the labor market.

This paper aims to present an interdisciplinary approach for the development and design of place brands, which goes far beyond communication strategies and advertising campaigns. The so-called “Brand-driven Identity Development of Places” (short: BIDP) approach provides a structured three-phase model that can serve as a practical guide for the development of commercial, touristy, urban and rural places.

Longitudinal collaborative action research over a time span of 20 years plus extended case study research supported the evolution of the BIDP approach.

BIDP is a circular three-phase model starting with the definition of the intended place brand identity, which in Phase 2 becomes translated into concrete touchpoint experiences along the main constituents of the place, and finally materialising into the new place format. The case study of the City of Innsbruck is prototypically used to illustrate the application of the designed approach and to report achieved results.

Place brand development based on translating socio-cultural meanings into touchpoint experiences to materialise and align place constituents is opening up new avenues to initiate and govern place development. At present, the approach is based on case studies in the western region of Austria and South Tyrol.

The three-phase model represents a practical tool for place brand managers, who want to renew and to develop their place format in a structured way. The BIDP model can be applied for all forms of places.

Foremost, the described place branding collaborations reassure the proposition of Olins (2002) and Schmidt (2007) that place branding is a crucial internal project that unites groups of people around a common strategic vision providing sense and direction besides reaching out to the traditional customer–stakeholder audience.

A structured model for brand-driven place development, which evolved during 20 years of longitudinal collaborative action research with executives and representatives of commercial, touristy, urban and rural places, BIDP locks into anthropological research findings where cultural meanings are considered as the main source for the construction of brand identities.

Extending the study of Chan et al. (2016), this paper aims to focus on specific aspects of performance (conceptual and factual knowledge) to provide insight into whether computer game attributes designed into Prrinciples Aren’t That Hard (PATH) improve performance.

A between-subjects experiment is conducted to test the hypotheses. The experimental and control groups are PATH and traditional paper medium, respectively.

The results reveal that PATH users perform better on the conceptual knowledge questions compared to the traditional paper medium users. No significant difference in performance on the factual knowledge (computational) questions is found between PATH and traditional paper medium users.

This study demonstrates that PATH creates an engaging learning environment, which facilitates the acquisition of conceptual knowledge and improved (conceptual) performance. Research can investigate whether technology may be used to facilitate automation of computational tasks which downplay the importance of computational skills (factual knowledge) and focus on the design of computer game attributes in educational or training programs to enhance conceptual knowledge and (conceptual) performance.

The findings of this study will assist educators and educational technology developers to identify and design motivation-enhancing computer game features to promote remember and understand cognitive processes which improve (conceptual) performance.

Game-based learning serves as the underlying theoretical framework for the design of PATH used in an experimental study to examine the positive effects of motivation-enhancing computer game attributes on remember and understand cognitive processes which facilitate (conceptual) performance. This study also uses separate measures of performance; that is, conceptual and factual knowledge, to provide additional insight into the findings of Chan et al. (2016).