PISA is seen as the gold standard for evaluating educational outcomes worldwide. Yet, being a low-stakes exam, students may not take it seriously resulting in downward biased scores and inaccurate rankings. This paper provides a method to identify and account for non-serious behavior in...

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...

The recent federal education bill, No Child Left Behind, requires states to test students in grades three to eight each year, and to judge school performance on the basis of these test scores. While intended to maximize student learning, there is little empirical evidence about the effectiveness...

We estimate peer effects for fourth graders in six European countries. The identification relies on variation across classes within schools. We argue that classes within primary schools are formed roughly randomly with respect to family background. Similar to previous studies, we find sizeable...

We evaluate the Reggio Approach using non-experimental data on individuals from the cities of Reggio Emilia, Parma and Padova belonging to one of five age cohorts: ages 50, 40, 30, 18, and 6 as of 2012. The treated were exposed to municipally offered infant-toddler (ages 0-3) and preschool (ages...

The view that empirical strategies in economics should be transparent and credible now goes almost without saying. The local average treatment effects (LATE) framework for causal inference helped make this so. The LATE theorem tells us for whom particular instrumental variables (IV) and...

Peer effects are potentially important for understanding the optimal organization of schools, jobs, and neighborhoods, but finding evidence is difficult because people are selected into peer groups based, in part, on their unobservable characteristics. I identify the effects of peers whom a...

Thanks to extraordinary and exponential improvements in data storage and computing capacities, it is now possible to collect, manage, and analyze data in magnitudes and in manners that would have been inconceivable just a short time ago. As the world has developed this remarkable capacity to...