The Education Reform Program launched in the mid-1990s by the Government of Bolivia had important accomplishments, particularly by increasing the coverage of primary education. However, the high rates of coverage observed at national level conceal the inequality in the distribution of schooling...

A state monopoly in schooling followed the collapse of communism in Central Europe. The centrally planned system was abandoned. Systems comparable with educational voucher scheme, also known as school choice system, were introduced in the Czech Republic and Hungary in the early 1990s. The newly...

Both current and especially new member states of the European Union face incentives to distort the provision of public education away from internationally applicable education towards country-specific skills. This would mean educating too few engineers, economists and doctors, and too many...

The mobility of labor reduces national incentives to invest in internationally applicable education. Such effects may be especially severe for the prospective new member states of the European Union. The European Union could overcome this by allowing countries to institute graduate taxes or...

We evaluate the effect of the federal students’ financial assistance scheme (BAfoeG) on enrolment rates into higher education by exploiting the exogenous variation introduced through a discrete shift in the repayment regulations. Supported students had to repay the full loan until 1990....

This is a theoretical study of human-capital formation, where parental, as well as public investments are essential. Policy influence rich and poor parents differently when they make educational decisions. Rich parents allocate resources efficiently between physical bequests and educational...

Teacher quality is widely believed to be important for education, despite little evidence that teachers' credentials matter for student achievement. To accurately measure variation in achievement due to teachers' characteristics-both observable and unobservable-it is essential to identify...

We utilize county-level data to explore growth determination in the U.S. and possible heterogeneity in growth determination across individual states. The data includes over 3,000 cross-sectional observations and 39 demographic control variables. We use a consistent two stage least squares...

This paper reports about a randomized field experiment in which first year economics and business students at the University of Amsterdam could earn financial rewards for passing the first year requirements within one year. Participants were assigned to a high, low and zero (control) reward...

This paper deals with the optimality of teacher incentive contracts in the presence of costly or limited government resources. It considers educational production under asymmetric information as a function of teacher effort and class size. In the presence of costly government resources and...