It has been argued that vocational education facilitates the school-to-work transition but reduces later adaptability to changing environments. Using the recent international data of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), we confirm such a trade-off over...

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...

Summary 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...

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...

Across Prussian counties and towns, Protestantism led to more schooling already in 1816, before the Industrial Revolution. This supports a human capital theory of Protestant economic history and rules out a Weberian explanation of Protestant education just resulting from industrialization.

The development of English-language skills, a near necessity in today's global economy, is heavily influenced by historical national decisions about whether to subtitle or dub TV content. While prior studies of language acquisition have focused on schools, we show the overwhelming influence of...