This paper evaluates the effects of a major Swedish school choice reform. The reform in 1992 increased school choice and competition among public schools as well as through a large-scale introduction of private schools. We estimate the effects of school choice and competition, using precise...

This paper evaluates average educational performance effects of an expanding independent school sector at the compulsory level by assessing a radical voucher reform that was implemented in Sweden in 1992. Starting from a situation where all public schools were essentially local monopolists, the...

This paper aims to understand how corruption responds to an income loss. We exploit an unexpected 25% wage cut incurred in 2010 by all Romanian public sector employees, including the public education staff. We investigate a corruptible high-stake exam taking place shortly after the wage...

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...

If being around smart people makes us smarter and more productive, what can regions do to attract smart people? This paper considers endogenous cultural amenities as a location factor for high-skilled workers. To overcome selection in the provision of cultural amenities, we exploit the variation...

This paper investigates how legal cannabis access affects student performance. Identification comes from an exceptional policy introduced in the city of Maastricht which discriminated legal access based on individuals’ nationality. We apply a difference-in-difference approach using...

In a two-period model, firms specialized in two different sectors lobby to induce the government to subsidize the type of education complementary to their production. Lobbying is endogenous. We show that, if lobbying is not costly, both sectors will lobby in equilibrium and education policy will...

We analyze whether a redistributive government should provide ex ante insurance against unfortunate outcomes or whether it should instead rely on transfers for redistributing income ex post. To this end, we develop a model of education in which individuals face educational risk and wage...

Decentralization of decision-making is among the most intriguing recent school reforms, in part because countries went in opposite directions over the past decade and because prior evidence is inconclusive. We suggest that autonomy may be conducive to student achievement in well-developed...

Educators in public schools in the United States are typically enrolled in defined-benefit pension plans, which penalize across-plan mobility. We use administrative data from Missouri to examine how the mobility penalties affect the labor market for school leaders. We show that pension borders...