Is it possible to compress instruction time into fewer school years without lowering education levels? A fundamental reform in Germany reduced the length of academic track schooling by one year, while increasing instruction hours in the remaining school years to provide students with a very...

Using data from a randomized experiment and fixed effect quantile regression (FEQR), we examine the effects of having a TFA teacher on test scores across the entire achievement distribution of primary school students in disadvantaged neighborhoods. While we generally find that TFA teachers...

A straightforward way to prevent students from leaving education without a higher secondary diploma is increasing the compulsory education age. The idea is that, by staying longer in school, more students eventually obtain a higher secondary diploma. This paper examines the impact of a one-year...

There is significant unease with the state of college loans in the US, of which Stafford loans are the most common. One of the most important issues relates to the “repayment burden” (RB), the proportion of a debtor's income per period required to repay loans. RBs are fundamental to...

In this paper, I estimate the differential effects of compulsory schooling laws on school quality between black and white schools in the United States segregated South. I employ state-level data on length of school terms and pupil–teacher ratios to examine these responses. Other literature has...

Understanding how higher education (HE) finance policy can affect HE decisions is important for understanding how governments can promote human capital accumulation. Yet there is a severe lack of evidence on the effectiveness of student aid in encouraging HE participation outside of the US, and...

This paper examines the effects of a compositional shift in a school’s testing population brought about by the elimination of special education testing exemptions. The policy change forced schools to add varying levels of generally low-achieving students to their testing pools, altering...

How students’ non-school inputs respond to ability grouping may explain the currently mixed findings in the literature about the impacts of tracking. Using data from South Korea, where students are randomized into middle schools under the country's equalization policy, but sorted into...

Over the last decade many districts implemented performance pay incentives to reward teachers for improving student achievement. Economic theory suggests that these programs could alter teacher work effort, cooperation, and retention. Because teachers can choose to work in a performance pay...

This paper estimates ability peer effects on achievement growth in reading and math. It exploits variation in peer characteristics generated at the transition from primary to secondary school in a sample of Berlin fifth-graders. As will be discussed in detail, this variation is exogenous in...