A review of the measures of the stock of human capital used in empirical growth research reveals that human capital is mostly poorly proxied. The simple use of the most common proxy, average years of schooling of the working-age population, misspecifies the relationship between education and the...

We try to identify which economic factors might be responsible for the large international differences in student performance. We present time series evidence for a number of European countries which suggests that rising educational expenditures obviously did not improve student performance....

Nach dem sogenannten PISA-Schock wird insbesondere in Deutschland intensiv diskutiert, wie die Qualität der schulische Ausbildung verbessert werden kann. Dabei herrscht die Überzeugung vor, dass die Qualität der schulischen Ausbildung eine wichtige Determinante des langfristigen...

We estimate changes in the productivity of schooling for six East Asian countries. Our productivity measure is based on changes in the relative price of schooling. A rising price of schooling relative to other labor-intensive service sectors should indicate declining relative schooling...

New evidence confirms the conclusion of former surveys that the link between school resources and student performance is generally missing in educational production. While the conventional within-country cross-section evidence remains controversial, recent contributions which control for...

We estimate educational production functions for seven Eastern European transition countries, using student-level TIMSS data for lower secondary education. The results show substantial effects of student background on educational performance and a much lower impact of resources and the...