Using data for 23 economies in Eastern and Western Europe, we find evidence that having studied under communism is relatively penalized in the economies of the late 2000s. This evidence, however, is limited to males and to primary and secondary education, and holds for eight CEE economies but...

We use aggregate PISA data for 19 countries over the period 2000–2009 to study whether a higher share of immigrant pupils affects the school performance of natives. We find evidence of a negative and statistically significant relationship. The size of the estimated effect is small: doubling...

A large population plays a two-period sequential common agency game. Agents are long lived, while principals are short lived. Preferences and technology are additively separable in time and time independent. At the onset, agents are matched in pairs under private information of individual types....

In this paper, we explore one mechanism that may underlie the negative relationship between social capital and smoking: whether social capital strengthens the effect of anti-smoking regulations. We use data on smoking behaviors collected immediately before and after the implementation of smoking...

Does Protestantism favour the market economy more than Catholicism does? We provide a novel quasi-experimental way to answer this question by comparing Protestant and Catholic minorities using Swiss census data from 1970 to 2000. Exploiting the strong adhesion of religious minorities to their...

We use a natural experiment to show that the presence of an external examiner has both a direct and an indirect negative effect on the performance of monitored classes in standardized educational tests. The direct effect is the difference in the test performance between classes of the same...

We use a natural experiment to show that the presence of an external examiner in standardized school tests reduces the proportion of correct answers in monitored classes by 5.5 to 8.5% – depending on the grade and the test – with respect to classes in schools with no external monitor. We...

This paper examines for the first time the consequences of ill health on labour supply for a sample of nine countries from the former Soviet Union (FSU), using a unique multicountry household survey specifically designed for this region. We control for a wide range of individual, household, and...