Policy debates about the balance of vocational and general education programs focus on the school-to-work transition. But with rapid technological change, gains in youth employment from vocational education may be offset by less adaptability and thus diminished employment later in life. To test...

Whether increasing resource use in schools has a positive effect on pupil performance has occupied governments, parents and researchers for decades. A main challenge when trying to answer this question is to separate the effects of school resources from the effects of pupils’ family...

Despite important policy implications associated with the allocation of education resources, evidence on the effectiveness of school inputs remains inconclusive. In part, this is due to endogenous allocation; families sort themselves non-randomly into school districts and school districts...

Do students perform better on statewide assessments in years in which they have more school days to prepare? We explore this question using data on math and reading assessments taken by students in the 3rd, 5th and 8th grades since 1994 in Maryland. Our identification strategy is rooted in the...

The impact of school resources on the quality of education in developing countries may depend crucially on whether resources are targeted efficiently. In this paper we use a randomized experiment to analyze the impact of a school grants program in Senegal, which decentralized a portion of the...

Many countries provide extra resources to schools serving disadvantaged pupils. We exploit a discontinuity in the assignment of such personnel subsidies in Flanders to estimate the impact on cognitive outcomes via a regression discontinuity (RD) design. Because bias can be substantial in RD...

Primary education in India is a development question of a unique magnitude, and the delivery of education by Indian states is often suspected to be marred by political haggling and corruption. Using rich administrative school-level panel data across Indian states, we test for electoral cycles in...

Based on the individual-level data of the PISA 2000 study, this note provides a detailed econometric analysis of the way that reading test scores are associated with individual and family background information and with characteristics of the school and class of the 15 to 16 year old respondents...

Most integration programs transfer students between schools within districts. In this paper, we study Metco, a long-running desegregation program that sends mostly Black students out of the Boston public school district to attend schools in more affluent suburban districts. Metco increases the...

Das deutsche Bildungssystem steht ungeachtet diverser Reformanstrengungen in der jüngeren Vergangenheit weiter vor großen Herausforderungen: Im internationalen Vergleich fehlt es an sozialer Chancengleichheit im Verlauf der Bildungskarrieren, und für eine "Bildungsnation" nehmen sich die...