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...

We follow the migration patterns of European inventors and find evidence of a novel emigration determinant: policy uncertainty. We find that policy uncertainty raises the rate of inventor emigration by a notable magnitude. With a one standard deviation in the policy uncertainty of the home...

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...

We follow the migration patterns of European inventors and find evidence of a novel emigration determinant: policy uncertainty. We find that policy uncertainty raises the rate of inventor emigration by a notable magnitude. With a one standard deviation in the policy uncertainty of the home...

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...

The general-equilibrium effects of performance-related teacher pay include long-term incentive and teacher-sorting mechanisms that usually elude experimental studies but are captured in cross-country comparisons. Combining country-level performance-pay measures with rich PISA-2003 international...

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...