An emerging economic literature over the past decade has made use of international tests of educational achievement to analyze the determinants and impacts of cognitive skills. The cross-country comparative approach provides a number of unique advantages over national studies: It can exploit...

This paper presents a model of educational production that tries to make sense of recent evidence on effects of institutional arrangements on student performance. In a simple principal-agent framework, students choose their learning effort to maximize their net benefits, while the government...

Based on Baumol's cost-disease model, we develop two alternative measures of the change in the productivity of schooling. Both productivity measures are based on changes in the relative price of schooling. We find that in most OECD countries the price of schooling has increased faster in 1970-94...

This article presents evidence on the associations between family background, school characteristics and student performance in primary school in Argentina, Colombia and several comparison countries. As a general pattern, educational performance is strongly related to family background, weakly...

We estimate the relationship between computers and students’ educational achievement in the international student-level PISA database. Bivariate analyses show a positive correlation between achievement and computer availability both at home and at school. However, once we control extensively...

This paper uses extensive student-level micro databases of three international student achievement tests to estimate heterogeneity in the effect of external exit examinations on student performance along three dimensions. First, quantile regressions show that the effect tends to increase with...

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...

Die Öffentlichkeit hat ein Interesse zu wissen, ob politische Maßnahmen die mit ihnen verfolgten Ziele wirksam und wirtschaftlich erreichen. In empirischen Studien, die als Grundlage für evidenzbasierte Wirtschaftspolitik dienen können, werden häufig komplexe Methoden verwendet, um...

Existing estimates of the labor-market returns to human capital give a distorted picture of the role of skills across different economies. International comparisons of earnings analyses rely almost exclusively on school attainment measures of human capital, and evidence incorporating direct...