Environmental factors add complexity to the comparison between specific activities or entire entities. Decision making units with an inferior performance are tempted to invoke that their organization is different from the others in the data set. By reinterpreting and extending the metafrontier...

We conducted a randomized controlled trial to examine the role of information provision on students’ preferences on higher education. The preferences were measured using a discrete choice experiment. The subjects comprised 2652 10 th grade low-income Colombian students, all of whom intended to...

School rankings based on value-added (VA) estimates are subject to prediction errors, since VA is defined as the difference between predicted and actual performance. We introduce a more flexible random forest (RF), rooted in the machine learning literature, to minimize prediction errors and to...

Targeted policy interventions are more effective than one-size-fits-all initiatives. This paper proposes the use of k-means cluster analysis to identify vulnerable groups with respect to financial literacy. Using a rich sample of 12 countries, we distinguish four groups with varying financial...