Using individual student test-score data from the School District of Philadelphia, we estimated the impact of for-profit and non-profit school management on student achievement by tracking the performance of students in math and reading from 2001 to 2006. After four years, the average student at...

Nineteenth-Century Catholic doctrine strongly opposed state schooling. We show that countries with larger shares of Catholics in 1900 (but without a Catholic state religion) tend to have larger shares of privately operated schools even today. We use this historical pattern as a natural...

What do citizens of the United States and Germany think about their schools and school policies? This paper offers the first broad comparison of public thinking on education in the two countries. We carried out opinion surveys of representative samples of the German and American adult...

Although recent evidence suggests that non-cognitive skills such as engagement matter for academic and economic success, there is little evidence on how key educational inputs affect the development of these skills. We present a re-analysis of follow-up data from the Project STAR class-size...

Nineteenth-Century Catholic doctrine strongly opposed state schooling. We show that countries with larger shares of Catholics in 1900 (but without a Catholic state religion) tend to have larger shares of privately operated schools even today. We use this historical pattern as a natural...