This paper investigates how the precision and stability of a teacher's value-added estimate relates to the characteristics of the teacher's students. Using a large administrative data set and a variety of teacher value-added estimators, it finds that the stability over time of teacher...

The typical measure used by researchers and school administrators to evaluate teachers is based on how the students' achievement increases after being exposed to the teacher, or based on the teacher's "value-added''. When teacher value-added is heterogeneous across her students, the typically...

The federal government's Race to the Top competition has promoted the adoption of test-based performance measures as a component of teacher evaluations throughout many states, but the validity of these measures has been controversial among researchers and widely contested by teachers' unions. A...

Information about teachers’ effectiveness at the hiring stage is particularly scarce despite its importance for personnel decisions. Using the German setting of teacher training, I investigate the relationship of teachers’ pre-service cognitive and pedagogical skills as measured by two state...

This paper studies the relationship between teacher unionization and student achievement. Generally stable patterns of teacher unionization since the 1970s have historically presented challenges in measuring the effects of unionization on educational production. However, the blossoming of the...

Recent evidence suggests a positive effect of the quantity of instruction on student achievement. In this paper, I focus on the interaction between the quantity and the quality of instruction. Using international TIMSS data, I exploit within-student between-subject variation. I find that on...

Using data from TIMSS 2015, an international large-scale assessment of student skills, I investigate the effect of teacher characteristics on students' science achievement. My identification strategy exploits the feature that in many education systems different science domains (physics, biology,...

Students in some countries do far better on international achievement tests than students in other countries. Is this all due to differences in what students bring with them to school – socio-economic background, cultural factors, and the like? Or do school systems make a difference? This...

Students in some countries do far better on international achievement tests than students in other countries. Is this all due to differences in what students bring with them to school – socio-economic background, cultural factors, and the like? Or do school systems make a difference? This...

Teachers are increasingly being drawn from the lower parts of the general ability distribution, but it is not clear how this affects student achievement. We track the position of entering teachers in population-wide cognitive and non-cognitive ability distributions using school grades and draft...