Tertiary education has been expanding hugely over the last decades, so that tertiary dropout students will constitute a growing distinctive group in future labour markets. University dropout is regularly discussed as a "negative" indicator in terms of reinforcing socio-economic inequalities and...

Literature examining immigrants' educational disadvantage across countries focuses generally on average differences in educational outcomes between immigrants and natives disguising thereby that immigrants are a highly heterogeneous group. The aim of this paper is to examine educational...

Student mobility is the most recognised element of Erasmus+, a major EU policy which celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2017. It is clearly popular with an increase in student uptake from 3.2 to 272.5 thousands from 1987 to 2014. Recent studies show that studying abroad provides benefits like...

While educational achievement surveys revolutionised research on education crossnationally, the surveys have been repeatedly subject of heated debate since first results were published. This paper reviews existing research examining the design and methodology of educational achievement surveys....

International surveys of learning achievement and functional literacy are increasingly common. We consider two aspects of the robustness of their results. First, we compare results from four surveys: TIMSS, PISA, PIRLS and IALS. This contrasts with the standard approach which is to analyse a...

Exploiting admission thresholds for participating in Erasmus, the most popular study abroad programme in Europe, we show implementing a regression discontinuity design that students' mobility does not delay graduation and, in addition, has a positive and significant impact on the final...

We analyse response patterns to an important survey of school children, exploiting rich auxiliary information on respondents' and non-respondents' cognitive ability that is correlated both with response and the learning achievement that the survey aims to measure. The survey is the Programme for...

Using logistic and multilevel logistic modelling we examine non-response at the school and pupil level to the important educational achievement survey Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for England. The analysis exploits unusually rich auxiliary information on all schools and...

International student mobility is the most recognised element of Erasmus+, a major EU policy. Not enough is known about the causal effect of studying abroad on labour market outcomes. This is because most of the existing studies dismiss selection bias: the different composition of students...