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...

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...

We estimate the relationship between students? educational achievement and the availability and use of computers at home and at school in the international student-level PISA database. Bivariate analyses show a positive correlation between student achievement and the availability of computers...

This paper uses extensive student-level micro databases of three international student achievement tests to estimate heterogeneity in the effect of external exit exams on student performance along three dimensions. First, quantile regressions show that the effect tends to increase with student...

Nineteenth-Century Catholic doctrine strongly opposed state schooling. We show that countries with larger shares of Catholics in 1900 (but without a Catholic state religion) tend to have larger shares of privately operated schools even today. We use this historical pattern as a natural...

Teachers differ greatly in how much they teach their students, but little is known about which teacher attributes account for this. We estimate the causal effect of teacher subject knowledge on student achievement using within-teacher within-student variation, exploiting a unique Peruvian...

The general-equilibrium effects of performance-related teacher pay include long-term incentive and teacher-sorting mechanisms that usually elude experimental studies but are captured in cross-country comparisons. Combining country-level performance-pay measures with rich PISA-2003 international...

Even though some countries track students into differing-ability schools by age 10, others keep their entire secondary-school system comprehensive. To estimate the effects of such institutional differences in the face of country heterogeneity, we employ an international...