A perennial debate worldwide over housing aid policy focuses on whether the government should provide housing vouchers or subsidized public housing units. To complement the empirically- dominated literature, this paper builds a general equilibrium model that merges urban land use (monocentric...

Recent studies of US elite exam schools have yielded the startling conclusion that such schools improve neither educational achievement nor longer-term educational outcomes. Is the same true for exam schools elsewhere? The system in Turkey is ideal for investigating this question. There,...

The standard economic model of occupational choice following a basic Roy model emphasizes individual selection and comparative advantage, but the sources of comparative advantage are not well understood. We employ a unique combination of Dutch survey and registry data that links math and...

Ensuring that all children in the world obtain at least basic skills is paramount for world development. At least two-thirds of the world's youth do not even reach basic skill levels - i.e., the world is short of meeting the Sustainable Development Goal of universal quality education. This is...

Human capital theory recognizes that time preferences - patience - are important for skill investments. We show how Facebook interests can be used to construct subnational measures of patience. Differences in patience are closely related to regional student achievement in Italy and the United...

The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions. This paper reviews the role of education in promoting economic well-being, with a particular focus on...

We provide evidence that the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth reflects a causal effect of cognitive skills and supports the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking student achievement across countries, over...

Economic development in Latin America has trailed most other world regions over the past four decades despite its relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle can be resolved by considering the actual learning as expressed in tests of cognitive skills, on which...

Even though some countries track students into differing-ability schools by age 10, others keep their entire secondary-school system comprehensive. To estimate the effects of such institutional differences in the face of country heterogeneity, we employ an international...

Economic development in Latin America has trailed most other world regions over the past four decades despite its relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle can be resolved by considering the actual learning as expressed in tests of cognitive skills, on which...