Do differences in citizens' policy preferences hamper international cooperation in education policy? To gain comparative evidence on public preferences for education spending, we conduct representative experiments with information treatments in Switzerland using identical survey techniques...

German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly...

Rising inequality in the United States has raised concerns about potentially widening gaps in educational achievement by socio-economic status (SES). Using assessments from LTT-NAEP, Main-NAEP, TIMSS, and PISA that are psychometrically linked over time, we trace trends in achievement for U.S....

Patience and risk-taking – two cultural traits that steer intertemporal decision-making – are fundamental to human capital investment decisions. To understand how they contribute to international differences in student achievement, we combine PISA tests with the Global Preference Survey. We...

This paper surveys the recent social science literature on religion in economic history, covering both socioeconomic causes and consequences of religion. Following the rapidly growing literature, it focuses on the three main monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and on the period up...

The standard assumption of exogenous policy preferences implies that parties set their positions according to their voters’ preferences. We investigate the reverse effect: Are the electorates’ policy preferences responsive to party positions? In a representative German survey, we inform...

A large literature studies subjective beliefs about economic facts using unincentivized survey questions. We devise randomized experiments in a representative online survey to investigate whether incentivizing belief accuracy affects stated beliefs about average earnings by professional degree...

A general concern with the representativeness of online surveys is that they exclude the “offline” population that does not use the internet. We run a large-scale opinion survey with (1) onliners in web mode, (2) offliners in face-to-face mode, and (3) onliners in face-to-face mode. We find...

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...

If school closures and social-distancing experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic impeded children’s skill development, they may leave a lasting legacy in human capital. To understand the pandemic’s effects on school children, this paper combines a review of the emerging international...