The paper estimates the effect of delayed school enrollment on student outcomes, using administrative data on Chilean students that include exact birth dates. Regression-discontinuity estimates, based on enrollment cutoffs, show that a one-year delay decreases the probability of repeating first...

International assessments of academic achievement are common. They are usually accompanied by attempts to infer the determinants of cross-country achievement gaps, but these inferences have little empirical foundation. This paper applies the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition to the problem of...

In 1980, Chile began financing public and most private schools with vouchers. This paper uses 1997 data on over 150 000 Chilean eighth-graders to compare Spanish and mathematics achievement in six types of public and private schools, including voucher schools operated by Catholic and...

In Chile, indigenous students obtain lower test scores, on average, than non-indigenous students. Between two cohorts of eighth-graders in the late 1990s, the test score gap declined by 0.1 to 0.2 standard deviations. An Oaxaca decomposition and related descriptive evidence suggest that the most...

The paper suggests that typical estimates of returns to primary education are over-estimated, because import costs to individuals are excluded. In calculations with Honduran data, private returns are found to drop significantly when private costs are included. It is suggested that lower private...

Expanding preschool education has the dual goals of improving child outcomes and work incentives for mothers. This paper provides evidence on the second, identifying the impact of preschool attendance on maternal labor market outcomes in Argentina. A major challenge in identifying the causal...

Primary school enrollments have increased rapidly in sub‐Saharan Africa, spurring concerns about low levels of learning. We analyze field experiments in Kenya and Uganda that assessed whether the Reading to Learn intervention, implemented by the Aga Khan Foundation in both countries, improved...

The paper analyzes a new Honduran conditional cash transfer experiment (Bono 10,000) in which 150 poor villages (of 300) were treated. The transfers were much larger in size than an earlier experiment (Galiani & McEwan, 2013), but yielded smaller full-sample effects on school enrollment, child...

Average grades in colleges and universities have risen markedly since the 1960s. Critics express concern that grade inflation erodes incentives for students to learn; gives students, employers, and graduate schools poor information on absolute and relative abilities; and reflects the quid pro...