We provide evidence that the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth reflects a causal effect of cognitive skills and supports the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking student achievement across countries, over...

Previous work suggests a general uncertainty surrounding the migration process acts as a barrier to outmigration. In this paper, we argue that this barrier is exacerbated when relative economic policy uncertainty is higher in the target country and mitigated when relatively higher in the origin...

Previous work suggests a general uncertainty surrounding the migration process acts as a barrier to outmigration. In this paper, we argue that this barrier is exacerbated when relative economic policy uncertainty is higher in the target country and mitigated when relatively higher in the origin...

Cross-country evidence on student achievement might be hampered by omitted country characteristics such as language or legal differences. This paper uses cross-state variation in Germany, whose sixteen states share the same language and legal system, but pursue different education policies. The...

We characterize intergenerational mobility in Germany using census data on educational attainment and parental income for 526,000 children. Our measure of educational attainment is the A-Level degree, a requirement for access to university. A 10 percentile increase in the parental income rank is...

The perpetual inventory method used for the construction of education data per country leads to systematic measurement error. This paper analyses the effect of this measurement error on GDP regressions. There is a systematic difference in the education level between census data and observations...

An emerging economic literature over the past decade has made use of international tests of educational achievement to analyze the determinants and impacts of cognitive skills. The cross-country comparative approach provides a number of unique advantages over national studies: It can exploit...

Critics of international student comparisons argue that results may be influenced by differences in the extent to which countries adequately sample their entire student populations. In this research note, we show that larger exclusion and non-response rates are related to better country average...

Even though some countries track students into differing-ability schools by age 10, others keep their entire secondary-school system comprehensive. To estimate the effects of such institutional differences in the face of country heterogeneity, we employ an international...

We use the PISA student-level achievement database to estimate international education production functions. Student characteristics, family backgrounds, home inputs, resources, teachers and institutions are all significantly related to math, science and reading achievement. Our models account...