The paper investigates the role of mothers in affecting childrens' performance at school. It develops a theoretical model in which household is treated as an individual, whose utility depends on the performance at school of the student and on consumption. The model focuses on the possibilities...

Gender-matching school environments may provide benefits for girls to enhance their performance. By using PISA data from South Korea, this paper suggests that the effects of single-sex schooling and a student-teacher's gender matching are heterogeneous across different student groups. The...

This paper investigates returns to women's education by applying an optimal IV selection approach, post-Lasso IV estimation, which improves the first-stage predictive relationship between an endogenous regressor and instruments. Using the 2010 American Community Survey, we find that an extra...

One would expect that family income is an important positive factor in the school attainment of children. However, evidence on this relationship is often tainted by the lack of control for parental ability, since at least a portion of ability is transferred genetically to children. This paper...

In present day Germany, one in seven children is raised in a single parent household. We investigate the effect of single parenthood on children’s educational attainment, measured by the school track at the age 14, using ordered probit models. We study whether the effect of living in single...

International surveys of learning achievement and functional literacy are increasingly common. We consider two aspects of the robustness of their results. First, we compare results from four surveys: TIMSS, PISA, PIRLS and IALS. This contrasts with the standard approach which is to analyse a...

A simple model of decentralised graduation standards is presented. It is shown that a school whose students are disadvantaged on the labour market applies less demanding standards because such students have less incentives to graduate. The model's predictions are tested using Dutch school-level...

One's position in an alphabetically sorted list may be important in determining access to rationed goods or oversubscribed public services. Motivated by anecdotal evidence, we investigate the importance of the position in the alphabet of the last name initial of Czech students for their...

We reanalyse data used by Le and Miller (2005), where it is found that students from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds have lower university participation rates than those from higher SES backgrounds. We utilise the concept of eligibility to attend university - here defined by both...