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...

Public policies often target individuals but within-family externalities of such interventions are understudied. Using a regression discontinuity design, we document how a third grade retention policy affects both the target children and their younger siblings. The policy improves test scores of...

To investigate the effects of reducing the intensity of tracking, this study exploits reforms across German states which combined the two lower secondary school tracks, sometimes additionally offering the possibility to acquire a university entrance qualification. Using a...

We estimate the impact of a large curriculum reform in Switzerland that substantially increased the share of foreign language classes in compulsory school on students' subsequent educational choices in upper secondary school. Using administrative student register data and exploiting the...

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...

We exploit a recent state-level reform in Germany that granted parents the right to decide on the highest secondary school track suitable for their child, changing the purpose of the primary teacher's recommendation from mandatory to informational. Applying a disaggregated synthetic control...

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...

Education can serve skill formation and socialisation goals both of which are conducive to desirable economic outcomes. However, the political manipulation of the school curricula can give rise to indoctrination effects with counterproductive welfare consequences on its pupils. This paper...

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...

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,...