In 2014, the government of Colombia launched a unique meanstested and merit-based scholarship program called Ser Pilo Paga. We examine the effects of this scholarship on student performance on the country's university exit exam and other educational outcomes. Exploiting thresholds for...

This paper revisits the link between education-based marriage market sorting and income inequality. Leveraging Danish administrative data, we develop a novel categorization of marriage market types based on the starting wages and wage growth trajectories associated with educational programs:...

Grade inflation in high schools is potentially problematic for students, education institutions, and society. We examine the extent of potential grading inflation in courses taken during high school and how such differences vary across student and school characteristics. Utilizing longitudinal,...

We study the effect of school closures and the transition from on-site to on-line teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic in the Finnish upper secondary schools. To identify the effects we exploit variation in the length of school closure periods across schools between autumn 2020 and spring 2021....

Using novel survey data collected from the states of Kaduna and Edo in Nigeria’s Northern and Southern Regions respectively, this study examined the relationship between educational attainment and attitudes towards gender equality. The measure for attitudes towards gender equality was derived...

Grade retention offers students a chance to catch up with unmastered material but also leads to less labor-market experience by delaying graduation and labor-market entry. This is the first paper to quantify this trade-off, using an exit exam cutoff of Dutch academic secondary schools, where...

More granular grading scales provide a more accurate assessment of achievement and thus provide students with more informative feedback on their performance. Using Swedish administrative data and exploiting a natural experiment, we identify the effects of moving from a system with three passing...

We analyse the evolving impact of family background on educational attainment using administrative data on 2,417,460 individuals from 1,341,403 families born in the Netherlands between 1966 and 1995. Comparisons between parents and their children reveal intergenerational elasticities between...

Deutschland ist ein Einwanderungsland. Der deutliche Zuwachs von Menschen aus dem Ausland in Deutschland und Bremen schlägt sich auch spürbar in den Arbeitsmarktstatistiken nieder. Gleichwohl sind viele Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund am Arbeitsmarkt in Bezug auf Einkommen und Sicherheit...

We study the effect of school closures and the transition from on-site to on-line teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic in the Finnish upper secondary schools. To identify the effects we exploit variation in the length of school closure periods across schools between autumn 2020 and spring 2021....

We investigate inherent gender bias in frequently used exam designs in higher education. Specifically, we study whether grade penalties for wrong answers in multiple-choice tests hurt female performance. We conducted a field experiment in a real-life final-exam setting, where students were...

Deutschland und die Schweiz hatten lange Zeit ähnliche (Aus-)Bildungssysteme mit klarer Trennung zwischen allgemeiner und beruflicher Bildung. Beide Länder haben ihre Systeme an die Herausforderungen der Globalisierung und des Strukturwandels auf verschiedene Weise angepasst. Vor diesem...

We estimate the transmission of higher education across generations using the arrival of the Pinochet dictatorship to Chile in 1973 as natural experiment. Pinochet promoted a large contraction in the number of seats available for new students across all universities. Using census data, we find...

Providing income support to unemployed education-leavers reduces the returns to investments in education because it makes the consequences of unemployment less severe. We evaluate a two-part policy reform in Belgium to study whether conditioning the prospective entitlement to unemployment...

Providing income support to unemployed education-leavers reduces the returns to investments in education because it makes the consequences of unemployment less severe. We evaluate a two-part policy reform in Belgium to study whether conditioning the prospective entitlement to unemployment...

Financial aid from the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation (STBF) provides exceptionally generous support to a college population similar to that served by a host of state aid programs. In conjunction with STBF, we randomly assigned aid awards to thousands of Nebraska high school graduates from...

We show that the first nationwide mass vaccination campaign against measles increased educational attainment in the United States. Our empirical strategy exploits the variation in exposure to the childhood disease across states right before the Measles Eradication Campaign of 1967–68, which...

This study examines Educational Attainment and Perception of Feminists' values among Bariga residents in Lagos State, Nigeria. It also investigates the influence of sex and other factors on perception of Feminists’ values. Feminists' theory, structural functionalism and Social construction...

Concerned about low levels of financial literacy among teens and the importance of their looming financial decisions as emerging adults, state policymakers have expanded high school personal finance graduation requirements. Did these added requirements create an additional barrier for students?...

Providing income support to unemployed education-leavers reduces the returns to investments in education because it makes the consequences of unemployment less severe. We exploit in a difference-in-differences approach a two-part policy reform in Belgium to study whether conditioning the...

I study the effects of the Future to Discover Project, a randomized experiment in which Canadian high school students were either invited to participate in career planning workshops or were made eligible for an $8,000 college grant. By matching the experimental data to post-secondary institution...

High school exit exams are meant to standardize the quality of public high schools and to ensure that students graduate with a set of basic skills and knowledge. Evidence suggests that a common perverse effect of exit exams is an increase in dropout for students who have difficulty passing...

We investigate the effects of a large-scale Norwegian reform that provided extra teachers to 166 lower secondary schools with relatively high student-teacher ratios and low average grades. We exploit these two margins using a regression discontinuity setup and find that the reform reduced the...

We investigate the effects of a large-scale Norwegian reform that provided extra teachers to 166 lower secondary schools with relatively high student-teacher ratios and low average grades. We exploit these two margins using a regression discontinuity setup and find that the reform reduced the...

Students are admitted into higher education based on their past performance. This paper compares two measures of past cognitive skills: teacher and national exam scores. By using a nationwide dataset, we look at how the predictive power of teacher assessment and exam scores for selecting...

We use administrative data on a sample of births between 1978 and 1985 to investigate the short, medium and long-term consequences of poor infant health. Our findings offer several advances to the existing literature on the effects of early infant health on subsequent health, education, and...