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...

EEAG’s 2007 Report provides a comprehensive forecast for the European economy for the coming year, with a special section on Eastern European countries. In addition, it addresses several important policy issues, including an in-depth examination of whether the features of the Scandinavian...

The trade-off between child quantity and quality is a crucial ingredient of unified growth models that explain the transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern growth. We present first evidence that such a trade-off indeed existed already in the nineteenth century, exploiting a unique...

East Asian students regularly take top positions in international league tables of educational performance. Using internationally comparable student-level data, I estimate how family background and schooling policies affect student performance in five high-performing East Asian economies. Family...

Within the framework of principal-agent-models, central exit exams canbe modelled as measures of accountability which hold students andschools responsible for their educational achievements. Comprehensiveregression analyses on the basis of individual student data provided byfour international...

Nineteenth-century Catholic doctrine strongly opposed state schooling. We show that countries with larger shares of Catholics in 1900 (but without a Catholic state religion) tend to have larger shares of privately operated schools even today. We use this historical pattern as a natural...

Evidence using micro data from four international student achievement tests shows that institutional features that ensure competition, autonomy and accountability in school systems are key to high student performance. The lessons that education policy can learn from the cross-country evidence...

We examine whether the sorting of high- and low-achieving students into classes of different sizes results in a regressive or compensatory pattern of class sizes for 18 national school systems. Sorting effects are identified by subtracting the causal effect of class size on performance from...