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...

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...

Existing estimates of the labor-market returns to human capital give a distorted picture of the role of skills across different economies. International comparisons of earnings analyses rely almost exclusively on school attainment measures of human capital, and evidence incorporating direct...

We estimate the effect of political regime transitions on growth with semi-parametric methods, combining difference in differences with matching, that have not been used in macroeconomic settings. Our semi-parametric estimates suggest that previous parametric estimates may have seriously...

School choice research mostly focuses on academic outcomes. Policymakers increasingly view entrepreneurial traits as a non-cognitive outcome important for economic growth. We use international PISA-2006 student-level data to estimate the effect of private-school competition on students'...

A huge body of empirical and theoretical literature has emerged on the relationship between foreign exchange (FX) uncertainty and international trade. Empirical findings about the impact of FX uncertainty on trade figures are at best weak and often ambiguous with respect to its direction. Almost...

The paper proposes a data driven adaptive model selection strategy. The selection crite- rion measures economic exante forecasting content by means of trading implied cash flows. Empirical evidence suggests that the proposed strategy is neither exposed to selection bias nor to the risk of...

It is commonly accepted that information is helpful if it can be exploited to improve a decision making process. In economics, decisions are often based on forecasts of up- or downward movements of the variable of interest. We point out that directional forecasts can provide a useful framework...

The central vs. local nature of high-school exit exam systems can have important repercussions on the labor market. By increasing the informational content of grades, central exams may improve the sorting of students by productivity. To test this, we exploit the unique German setting where...