students, this paper presents a simple model showing that free riding incentives lead to an insufficient degree of cooperation … competitive behaviour is negatively evaluated by schoolmates, especially when the class is more homogeneous in terms of students … International Student Assessment (PISA) survey on students' literacy levels. A competitive learning approach has a positive …

Private school students do not always perform better in standardized tests. We suggest that this may be explained by … choice of private schooling by less capable students in countries where government schools are better suited to talented … students. To assess the empirical relevance of this mechanism, we exploit cross-country variation in the PISA 2009 survey of …