"This paper: i) estimates the effect that going to a better school has on students' academic achievement, and ii) explores whether this intervention induces behavioral responses on the part of children, their parents, and the school system. For the first task, we exploit almost 2,000 regression...

This paper examines the roles that information and preferences play in determining whether households choose schools with high value added. We study Romanian school markets using administrative data, a survey, and an experiment. The administrative data show that, on average, households could...

Pop-Eleches and Urquiola (2013) apply a regression discontinuity to the Romanian secondary school system, and notably find that (a) students who go to a better school get higher scores on an exam used for university admission, (b) parents of students who get into a better school help their kids...

We examine student, teacher, and peer perceptions of effort, ability, performance, and self-confidence in Romania's highly tracked schools. We find that: (1) students just above a cutoff--tracked into high-achieving classes--have less favorable self-perceptions than those just below...

This paper explores whether conditions during early childhood affect the productivity of later human capital investments. We use Romanian administrative data to ask if the benefit of access to better schools is larger for children who experienced better family environments because their parents...

This paper: i) estimates the effect that going to a better school has on students' academic achievement, and ii) explores whether this intervention induces behavioral responses on the part of children, their parents, and the school system. For the first task, we exploit almost 2,000 regression...