We examine the role of teachers and students in the formation of grade 12 test scores in public schools in Delhi. There is substantial variation in teacher and student quality within schools. Over the period spanning grades 11 and 12, being taught by a standard deviation better than average...

We comment on the work of Hanushek et al. (2015) and show that returns to skills are very heterogeneous and depend crucially on the tasks performed in the workplace, in line with the critique by Acemoglu and Autor (2011). Depending on the type of tasks performed at work, as well as on...

This paper investigates the impact of attending early childcare on second generation immigrant children's cognitive outcomes. Our analysis draws on administrative data on the entire population of students in fifth grade collected by the Italian Institute for the Evaluation of the Educational...

In this paper we study the allocation of time devoted to informal learning and education, i.e. those activities carried out during leisure time and outside formal education courses which boost individuals’ human and social capital. For immigrants the private investment in these activities is...

Children of Asian immigrants in most English-speaking destinations have better academic outcomes, yet the underlying causes of their advantages are under-studied. We employ panel time-use diaries by two cohorts of children observed over a decade to present new evidence that children of Asian...

Do investments in soft skills pay off in terms of student achievement? This paper evaluates a large private-sector program in this area, EPIS, based on individual and small-group sessions of mediators that seek to improve the non-cognitive skills (e.g. motivation, self-esteem, conscientiousness)...

Despite extensive literature on peer effects, the role of peers on personality skill development remains poorly understood. We fill this gap by investigating the effects of having disadvantaged primary school peers, generated by random classroom assignment and parental migration for employment....

Technological change and globalization have sparked debates on the changing demand for skills in western labour markets, especially for middle skilled workers who have seen their tasks replaced. This paper provides a new data set, which is based on text data from curricula of the entire Dutch...

This paper develops a model that allows for heterogenous contemporaneous peer effects among different types of agents who are endogenously selected into different peer groups. Using our framework, we characterize the reduced-form coefficient in the peer effect literature and show that it is a...

A double disadvantage occurs when the interaction of two disadvantages generates an additional disadvantage. We show that second-generation immigrant children in the Italian primary school experience a double disadvantage that, relative to the average native, reduces scores in Italian by 17% and...