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...

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...

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...

We use the PISA student-level achievement database to estimate international education production functions. Student characteristics, family backgrounds, home inputs, resources, teachers and institutions are all significantly related to math, science and reading achievement. Our models account...

We provide a measure of equality of educational opportunity in 54 countries, estimated as the effect of family background on student performance in two international TIMSS tests. We then show how organizational features of the education system affect equality of educational opportunity. Our...

The paper provides a comparative analysis of the association between student achievement and public-private partnerships (PPPs) in schooling across countries. Student-level data from the PISA international achievement test provides information on the public-private character of both operation...

Using Swedish population register data on cohorts born 1982-1994 (N=1,087,750), we examine the effects of preterm births on school grades using sibling fixed effect models which compare individuals with their non-preterm siblings. We test for heterogeneous effects by degree of prematurity, as...

We study whether a democracy improves a measure of individual wellbeing; human heights. Drawing on individual-level datasets, we test the hypothesis using a battery of eight different measures of democracy and derived averages, and include models accounting for several confounders, regional and...