performance in pre-university education. Employing data from central exit exams, a positive link between competition intensity and …

Learning profiles, that track changes in student skills per year of schooling, often find shockingly low learning gains …. Using data from three recent studies in South Asia and Africa, we show that a majority of students spend years of … instruction with no progress on basics. We argue shallow learning profiles are in part the result of curricular paces moving much …

This article investigates the macro-level drivers of adult-age language learning. We construct a new dataset that … covers German language learning in 77 countries (including Germany) for 1992-2006. Fixed-effects regressions show that … language learning in the EU is strongly associated with immigration. Instead, immigration by non-EU citizens in associated with …

The paper is devoted to an econometric analysis of learning foreign languages in all parts of the world. Our sample … covers 193 countries and 13 important languages. Four factors significantly explain learning, two of which affect the broad … learning while the world population of speakers of the native language generally discourages it. Trade with speakers of a …

learning, and even idiosyncratic variation. Our paper cautions that the slider task will be underpowered for uncovering a …