We investigate the effects of a large-scale Norwegian reform that provided extra teachers to 166 lower secondary schools with relatively high student-teacher ratios and low average grades. We exploit these two margins using a regression discontinuity setup and find that the reform reduced the...

Good teachers are the backbone of a successful education system. Yet, in developing countries, teachers' content knowledge is often inadequate. This study documents that primary school math teachers in the department of Moraz'an in El Salvador only master 47 percent of the curriculum they teach....

Whether increasing resource use in schools has a positive effect on pupil performance has occupied governments, parents and researchers for decades. A main challenge when trying to answer this question is to separate the effects of school resources from the effects of pupils' family background,...

Despite important policy implications associated with the allocation of education resources, evidence on the effectiveness of school inputs remains inconclusive. In part, this is due to endogenous allocation; families sort themselves non-randomly into school districts and school districts...

There is massive cross-sectional evidence that children of more educated parents outperform their schoolmates on tests, grade repetition and in educational attainment. However, evidence for causal interpretation of this association is weak. Within a rich census level data set for Norway, we...

This paper studies the distributions of literacy skills, education, and employment of immigrants and natives in three host countries: Canada, the United States, and Norway. For natives, we uncover remarkably stable relations between literacy skills, schooling, and employment across countries....

Education is one of the key resources in the fight against poverty. While substantial progress has been made in terms of school enrollment, evidence suggests that educational quality is still alarmingly low in many developing countries. Various explanations have been suggested, but one very...

This study provides novel evidence on the relative effectiveness of computer-assisted learning (CAL) software and traditional teaching. Based on a randomized controlled trial in Salvadoran primary schools, we evaluate three interventions that aim to improve learning outcomes in mathematics: (i)...

Participatory teaching methods have been shown to be more successful than traditional rote learning in high-income countries. It is, however, less clear if they can help address the learning crisis in low- and middle-income countries, where classes tend to be large and teachers have fewer...