"America's educational system excels in at least one area: university-based research. Why? Miguel Urquiola, an economist of education, argues that the key is that the United States takes a free market approach to education. Urquiola begins by showing how dominant American universities are in...

This paper reviews the progress economists have made towards achieving an evidence-based educational policy, and highlights challenges that remain. The five main findings are: (1) over the past two decades, much effort has gone into identifying the causal effects of school inputs; this work has...

The impact of competition on academic outcomes is likely to depend on whether parents are informed about schools' effectiveness or valued added (which may or may not be correlated with absolute measures of their quality), and on whether this information influences their school choices, thereby...

The notion that free choice is welfare-enhancing is one of the foundations of modern, market-oriented societies. This view is prominent in the school choice debate, where there is a widespread perception that public schools are inecientlocal monopolies, and that the quality of education would...

The authors address the question of infrastructure reforms in a novel way by focusing on the impact which they can have on consumers through the prices paid by different groups and on their access to the networks. They analyse original material from four Latin American countries –...

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...