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...

Using millions of father-son pairs spanning more than 100 years of US history, we find that children of immigrants from nearly every sending country have higher rates of upward mobility than children of the US-born. Immigrants' advantage is similar historically and today despite dramatic shifts...

We combine full-count Census data (1850-1940) with Census/ACS samples (1950-2020) to provide the first nationally representative long-run series (1850-2020) of incarceration rates for immigrants and the US-born. As a group, immigrants had higher incarceration rates than US-born white men before...

In the context of interwar Poland, we find that Jews tended to be more literate than non Jews, but show that this finding is driven by a composition effect. In particular, most Jews lived in cities and most non-Jews lived in rural areas, and people in cities were more educated than people in...

Rising inequality in the United States has raised concerns about potentially widening gaps in educational achievement by socio-economic status (SES). Using assessments from LTT-NAEP, Main-NAEP, TIMSS, and PISA that are psychometrically linked over time, we trace trends in achievement for U.S....

Patience and risk-taking - two cultural traits that steer intertemporal decision-making - are fundamental to human capital investment decisions. To understand how they contribute to international differences in student achievement, we combine PISA tests with the Global Preference Survey. We find...

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...

Critics of international student comparisons argue that results may be influenced by differences in the extent to which countries adequately sample their entire student populations. In this research note, we show that larger exclusion and non-response rates are related to better country average...

Economic development in Latin America has trailed most other world regions over the past four decades despite its relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle can be resolved by considering the actual learning as expressed in tests of cognitive skills, on which...

The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions. This paper reviews the role of education in promoting economic well-being, with a particular focus on...