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...

Ludger Wößmann legt in seinem auf die Bildung fokussierten Beitrag dar, dass gerade Basiskompetenzen, wie sie von internationalen Schülervergleichstests in Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften erhoben werden, ein entscheidender Einflussfaktor auf das langfristige Wachstum von Volkswirtschaften...

Welche Reformen sollten im deutschen Schulsystem umgesetzt werden? In dieser und den kommenden drei Ausgaben des ifo Schnelldienstes berichtet die Artikelserie "Ökonomische Beiträge zur Schuldebatte" über die Befunde zahlreicher Forschungsarbeiten der Abteilung Humankapital und Strukturwandel...

"This paper presents the evaluation of the program Computers for Education. The program aims to integrate computers, donated by the private sector, into the teaching of language in public schools. The authors conduct a two-year randomized evaluation of the program using a sample of 97 schools...

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...

We evaluate the causal effects of a program that constructed high quality "girl-friendly" primary schools in Burkina Faso, using a regression discontinuity design 2.5 years after the program started. We find that the program increased enrollment of all children between the ages of 5 and 12 by 20...

We conduct a randomized evaluation of the effect of village-based schools on children's academic performance using a sample of 31 villages and 1,490 children in rural northwestern Afghanistan. The program significantly increases enrollment and test scores among all children, eliminates the 21...