East Asian students regularly take top positions in international league tables of educational performance. Using internationally comparable student-level data, I estimate how family background and schooling policies affect student performance in five high-performing East Asian economies. Family...

Academic rank in school has a significant role in generating an observed gap in educational outcomes among students; however, there is little evidence on the serial persistence of its impact. Using idiosyncratic variation in the test score distribution across classes, this paper examines the...

I explore the causal effects of single-sex high schools on long-term labor market outcomes using a unique feature of educational policy in South Korea--—the random assignment of students to single-sex versus coeducational high schools. I find that the effect of single-sex schooling on earnings...

We exploit two unusual policy features of academic high schools in Seoul, South Korea - random assignment of pupils to high schools within districts and conversion of some existing single-sex schools to the coeducational (coed) type over time - to identify three distinct causal parameters: the...