This paper presents the conditions under which a causal interpretation can be given to the association between childhood parental employment and subsequent education of children. In a model in which parental preferences are separable in own consumption and children's wellbeing, estimation is...

We explore the variation in pupil attainment at the end of secondary schooling in England. The paper links data on all schools and all pupils within these schools to analyse the role of the school in accounting for this variation. We analyse a number of different indicators of pupil attainment...

There is considerable disagreement in the academic literature about whether raising school expenditure improves educational outcomes. Yet changing the level of resources is one of the key policy levers open to governments. In the UK, school expenditure has increased by about 40 per cent in real...

Improving the educational attainment of disadvantaged students in urban schools is a priority for policy worldwide, but existing research is equivocal about the effectiveness of additional funding for achieving this objective. This study exploits anomalies in the spatial dimension of school...

This study develops an analytical framework for evaluating the respective contributions of pupils, peers, and school quality in affecting educational achievement. We implement this framework using rich data from England that matches pupils to their primary schools. The dataset records all...

We show that in school systems with grade retention or redshirting, birth cohort size is negatively related to the grade-level share of students who are too old for their grade. This compositional effect gives rise to an upward bias in estimates of class size effects based on commonly used...

Using data from three waves of PIRLS, this paper examines the effect of teacher quality on fourth-grade students' literacy test scores by exploiting variations induced by reforms in teachers' selection and/or reward schemes. We construct an original data set of relevant reforms taking place at...

We present evidence that the practice of holding back poorly performing students affects estimates of the impact of class size on student outcomes based on within-school variation of cohort size over time. This type of variation is commonly used to identify class size effects. We build a...

The 2010 primary school reform in the UK aimed at giving schools more autonomy and freedom from local council's control, by giving them the option to become academies. Once converted, schools need to choose between remaining a standalone academy or joining an academy chain. However, the majority...

This study uses the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) data, the only cross-national data having measured educational achievement during the COVID-19 pandemic, to investigate educational achievement decline of fourth graders across 21 European countries between 2016 and...