This study of the emergence of inequality during the early years is based upon a comparative analysis of children at the age of about five years in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. We study a series of child outcomes related to readiness to learn, focusing on...

This paper studies how different demographic groups respond to incentives by comparing performance in the GRE examination in "high" and "low" stakes situations. The high stakes situation is the real GRE examination and the low stakes situation is a voluntary experimental section of the GRE that...

Aside from effects on nearby property values, research is sparse on how foreclosures may generate negative externalities. Employing a unique dataset that matches individual student records from Boston Public Schools - including test scores, demographics, home address moves, and school changes -...

This paper documents disparities in cognitive development-as measured by a receptive vocabulary test-between children from households with high and low socioeconomic status (SES) in two different phases of childhood (before and after early school years) in four developing countries: Peru,...

This paper studies the extent to which young children develop their cognitive ability in high and low quality schools. We use a representative panel data set containing cognitive test scores of 4-6 year olds in Dutch schools. School quality is measured by the school's average achievement test...

Past research has shown that Hispanic students make test score gains relative to whites as they age through school; however, this finding stands in contrast to the experience of blacks, who show little change in their relative position over the same time frame. Distinguishing Hispanic students...

This paper examines the economic origins of the Islamic revival that took place in Egypt in the 1970-80s, and in Muslim societies more generally. We provide the first systematic evidence of a decline in social mobility among educated youth in Egypt. Developing a behavioral model of religion, we...

Even in OECD countries, where an increasing proportion of the workforce has a university degree, the value of basic skills in literacy and numeracy remains high. Indeed, in some countries the return for such skills, in the form of higher wages, is sufficiently large to suggest that they are in...

Prior to the introduction of mother tongue based education in 1994, the language of instruction for most subjects in Ethiopia's primary schools was the official language (Amharic) - the mother tongue of only one third of the population. This paper uses the variation in individual's exposure to...

Do increased instruction hours improve the performance of all students? Using PISA scores of students in ninth grade, we analyse the effect of a German education reform that increased weekly instruction hours by two hours (6.5 percent) overalmost five years. In the additional time, students are...