The high school exit exam (HSEE) is rapidly becoming a standardized assessment procedure for educational accountability in the United States. I use a unique state-specific dataset to identify the effect of failing the HSEE on the likelihood that a student drops out early based on a Regression...

Tens of thousands of young people leave school with no or very few qualifications in England. This paper seeks to build a fuller picture of Key Stage 4 low achievement and its correlates than available hitherto. We focus on three aspects. Firstly, the role of students’ personal...

Individuals and business owners engage in an increasingly complex array of financial decisions that are critical for their success and well-being. Yet a growing literature documents that in both developed and developing countries, a large fraction of the population is unprepared to make these...

I investigate the effect of faculty quality on Ph.D. student outcomes. To address the endogeneity of faculty quality I use exogenous variation provided by the expulsion of mathematics professors in Nazi Germany. I find that faculty quality is a very important determinant of short and long run...

Gaps in welfare attainment between boys and girls in China have attracted international attention. In this paper demand analysis is used to try and uncover the factors which may be driving the emergence of the gender gaps. Drawing on household expenditure data from a poor (Sichuan) and rich...

Children’s outcomes are strongly correlated with those of their neighbours. The extent to which this is causal is the subject of an extensive literature. An identification problem exists because people with similar characteristics are observed to live in close proximity. Another major...

This paper uses administrative longitudinal micro data on the universe of Junior High school students in Uruguay to measure the effect of grade failure on students' subsequent school outcomes. Exploiting the discontinuity induced by a rule establishing automatic grade failure for pupils missing...

This paper tests if gender-discrimination in grading affects pupils' achievements and course choices. I use a unique dataset containing grades given by teachers, scores obtained anonymously by pupils at different ages, and their course choice during high school. Based on double-differences, the...

This paper uses household, school, and test score data from Bangladesh to compare and contrast the effectiveness of NGO-run and state-run schools in the provision of primary education. I study how the entry of NGOs in primary education has affected educational outcomes of girls and examine the...

Given recent emphasis on externality to education, macroeconomic studies have a role to play in the analysis of return to schooling. In this paper we study the connection between growth and human capital in a convergence regression for the panel of Italian regions. We include measures of...