We study the effects of performance bonuses in immigrant language training for adults. A Swedish policy pilot conducted in 2009-2010 gave a randomly assigned group of municipalities the right to grant substantial cash bonuses to recently arrived migrants. The results suggest substantial effects...

The federal government's Race to the Top competition has promoted the adoption of test-based performance measures as a component of teacher evaluations throughout many states, but the validity of these measures has been controversial among researchers and widely contested by teachers' unions. A...

This paper investigates how the precision and stability of a teacher's value-added estimate relates to the characteristics of the teacher's students. Using a large administrative data set and a variety of teacher value-added estimators, it finds that the stability over time of teacher...

Das deutsche Bildungssystem steht ungeachtet diverser Reformanstrengungen in der jüngeren Vergangenheit weiter vor großen Herausforderungen: Im internationalen Vergleich fehlt es an sozialer Chancengleichheit im Verlauf der Bildungskarrieren, und für eine "Bildungsnation" nehmen sich die...

In elementary school, girls typically outperform boys in languages and boys typically outperform girls in math. The determinants of these differences have remained largely unexplored. Using rich data from Dutch elementary schools, we decompose the differences in achievement into gender...

At the end of middle school, many low achieving students have to abandon hope of getting into selective high-school programs, which may be a source of disappointment and eventually lead them to dropout from high-school. Based on a randomized controlled trial, this paper shows that low-achieving...

This paper examines critically the presumption that, other things equal, private schooling offers higher quality education than public schooling. We apply multilevel regression on the 2009 PISA to estimate the differential effect of public and private schooling on student scores in Australia. We...

PISA scores are an internationally established indicator of student and school performance. This paper builds on the evidence that better PISA scores are known to be associated with better later life outcomes. It uses the Australian PISA micro-level data in combination with its longitudinal...

Private school students do not always perform better in standardized tests. We suggest that this may be explained by choice of private schooling by less capable students in countries where government schools are better suited to talented students. To assess the empirical relevance of this...

Estimates using admissions lotteries suggest that urban charter schools boost student achievement, while charter schools in other settings do not. Using the largest available sample of lotteried applicants to charter schools, we explore student-level and school-level explanations for this...