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...

What do applicants care about when choosing a school in Turkey? Are their preferences vertical or horizontal? Which school attributes seem to matter? Do selective schools con-tribute to their students' ; success, or is their performance attributable to the higher ability of the students they...

This paper aims to understand how corruption responds to an income loss. We exploit an unexpected 25% wage cut incurred in 2010 by all Romanian public sector employees, including the public education staff. We investigate a corruptible high-stake exam taking place shortly after the wage...

Is human capital a robust predictor of good institutions? Using a new institutional quality measure, the International Property Rights Index (IPRI), we find that cognitive skill measures are significant, robust, and large in magnitude. We use two databases of cognitive skills: estimates of...

We study the relationship between education and fertility, exploiting compulsory schooling reforms in England and Continental Europe, implemented between 1936 and 1975. We assess the causal effect of education on the number of biological children and the incidence of childlessness. We find...

Little work has been done on the biological conditions for the US Central Plains. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, black and white statures in Nebraska increased with economic development, indicating that biological conditions improved as Nebraska's output market and...

Differences in teacher quality are commonly cited as a key determinant of the huge international student performance gaps. However, convincing evidence on this relationship is still lacking, in part because it is unclear how to measure teacher quality consistently across countries. We use unique...

We estimate the size and trend of the Egyptian shadow economy using two of the most common methods: the currency demand approach and the structural equation MIMIC model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study to estimate the size of the shadow economy in Egypt during...

We exploit two unusual policy features of academic high schools in Seoul, South Korea - random assignment of pupils to high schools within districts and conversion of some existing single-sex schools to the coeducational (coed) type over time - to identify three distinct causal parameters: the...

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’...