Characteristics of teaching institutions and students’ performance : new empirical evidence from OECD data

A whole branch of the economic literature suggests that institutional differences between and inside educational systems may have a larger influence on students performance than the amount of resources devoted to schooling. In this paper, we use the PISA 2000 international OECD data to evaluate the impacts of organizational and institutional factors on students performance. We estimate an education production function with country fixed-effect and school random-effect. We find that, alongside individual characteristics, school autonomy in decisions regarding the recruitment of new personnel as well as pedagogical training strongly affect students performance. On the contrary, measures of school resources and standardised evaluation of students have no consistent effect.