We show that, when school quality is measured by the educational standard and attaining the standard requires costly effort, secondary education needs not be a hierarchy with private schools offering better quality than public schools, as in Epple and Romano, 1998. An alternative configuration,...

We present a theory explaining the impact of ability tracking on academic performance based on grading policies. Our model distinguishes between initial ability, which is mainly determined by parental background, and eagerness to extend knowledge. We show that achievements of low ability...

School assignment policies are a key lever to increase access to high performing schools and to promote racial and socioeconomic integration. For over 50 years, the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO) has bussed students of color from Boston, Massachusetts to relatively...

We study the dynamics of the quantity and quality of teachers in the framework of dynamic general equilibrium OLG model. The quantity and quality are jointly set by a government agency wishing to maximize the quality of basic education per student while being bound by teachers’ collective...

"The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions. This paper reviews the role of education in promoting economic well-being, with a particular focus on...

By the 2008/09 school year the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany) abolished binding school catchment areas (SCAs) in all municipalities. The reform has been controversial and it was feared that school choice would increase ethnic segregation. Using data on all primary schools, we...

We model centralized school matching as a second stage of a simple Tiebout-model and show that the two most discussed mechanisms, the deferred acceptance and the Boston algorithm, both produce inefficient outcomes and that the Boston mechanism is more efficient than deferred acceptance. This...

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...

Numerous countries require teachers to assign comportment grades rating students' social and work behavior in the classroom. However, the impact of such policies on student outcomes remains unknown. We exploit the staggered introduction of comportment grading across German federal states to...

This paper studies the effect of longer school days - induced by voluntary all-day programs in German primary schools - on school performance. We combine data from the National Educational Panel Study covering 5771 primary school students with municipality-level information on all-day school...