The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions. This paper reviews the role of cognitive skills in promoting economic well-being, with a particular...

Identifying the impact of local firm concentration on individual firm performance is likely to produce a selection bias related to the positive effects of local concentration if agglomeration economies and natural advantages coincide. We overcome this problem by exploiting exogenous variation...

We use estimates of the effect of educational achievement-measured by international student achievement tests-on economic growth to simulate the impact of improved achievement for individual EU countries and the EU as a whole. We calculate the present value of improvements in GDP over the life...

Decentralization of decision-making is among the most intriguing recent school reforms, in part because countries went in opposite directions over the past decade and because prior evidence is inconclusive. We suggest that autonomy may be conducive to student achievement in well-developed...

Larger rates of exclusion, non-response, and age-specific enrollment are related to better country average scores on international student achievement tests. But accounting for sample selectivity does not alter existing evidence that academic achievement enters importantly in economic growth...

Eintrag für die Universitätsbibliographie

We shed new light on the relative importance that schools’ ability to produce high achievers in math has for economic growth. Drawing on data from the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), the world championship in mathematics for high school students, we construct a measure for a...

Even though some countries track students into differing-ability schools by age 10, others keep their entire secondary-school system comprehensive. To estimate the effects of such institutional differences in the face of country heterogeneity, we employ an international...