Private school students do not always perform better in standardized tests. We suggest that this may be explained by choice of private schooling by less capable students in countries where government schools are better suited to talented students. To assess the empirical relevance of this...

We study whether the combined significant reduction in the pupil-teacher ratio and increase in parental education observed in Italy between the end of World War II and the end of the 1980s have had a significant impact on the educational attainment and the labor market returns of a...

Thanks to the effort of two local educational authorities, in two regions of North Italy (Valle d'Aosta and the autonomous province of Trento) the PISA 2009 test was re-administered to the same students one year later. This paper is the first to analyse in the OECD-PISA context the potential...

We quantify the causal effect of schooling on cognitive skills across 21 countries and the full distribution of working-age individuals. We exploit exogenous variation in educational attainment induced by a broad set of institutional reforms affecting different cohorts of individuals in...