Does a high regional concentration of immigrants of the same ethnicity affect immigrant children's acquisition of host-country language skills and educational attainment? We exploit the exogenous placement of guest workers from five ethnicities across German regions during the 1960s and 1970s in...

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...

We investigate the achievement impact of alternative uses of student assessments. Our dataset covers over 2 million students in 59 countries observed over 6 waves in the international PISA test 2000-2015. Our empirical model exploits the country panel dimension to investigate assessment reforms...

To study how information about educational inequality affects public concerns and policy preferences, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of the German population. Providing information about the extent of educational inequality strongly increases concerns about educational...

Decentralization of decision making is among the most intriguing recent school reforms, in part because countries went in opposite directions over the past decade and because prior evidence is inconclusive. We suggest that autonomy may be conducive to student achievement in well-developed...