An emerging economic literature over the past decade has made use of international tests of educational achievement to analyze the determinants and impacts of cognitive skills. The cross-country comparative approach provides a number of unique advantages over national studies: It can exploit...

Students in some countries do far better on international achievement tests than students in other countries. Is this all due to differences in what students bring with them to school - socio-economic background, cultural factors, and the like? Or do school systems make a difference? This essay...

We exploit variation stemming from school consolidations in Denmark from 2010-2011 to analyze the impact on student achievement as measured by test scores. For each student we observe enrollment and test scores one year prior to school consolidation and up to four years after. We find that...

We use the PISA student-level achievement database to estimate international education production functions. Student characteristics, family backgrounds, home inputs, resources, teachers and institutions are all significantly related to math, science and reading achievement. Our models account...

Should education be subsidized for the purpose of redistribution? The usual argument against subsidies to education above the primary level is that the rich take up most education, so a subsidy would increase inequality. We show that there is a counteracting effect: an increase in the stock of...

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...

The fraction of persons holding a college degree differs nearly two-fold across U.S. states. This paper documents data related to state educational attainment differences and explores possible explanations. It shows that highly educated states employ skillbiased technologies, specialize in...

To understand the socio-economic enrollment gap in university attendance, we elicit students’ beliefs about the benefits of university education in a sample of 2,540 secondary school students. Our choice model estimates reveal that perceived non-pecuniary benefits explain a large share of the...

Rising inequality in the United States has raised concerns about potentially widening gaps in educational achievement by socio-economic status (SES). Using assessments from LTT-NAEP, Main-NAEP, TIMSS, and PISA that are psychometrically linked over time, we trace trends in achievement for U.S....

We investigate the employment consequences of deindustrialization for 1,993 cities in France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, and the United States. In all six countries we find a strong negative relationship between a city's share of manufacturing employment in the year of its country's...