We study whether reallocating existing teachers across schools within a district can increase student achievement, and what policies would help achieve these gains. Using a model of multi-dimensional value-added, we find meaningful achievement gains from reallocating teachers within a district....

Women account for only 35% of global STEM graduates, a share that has remained unchanged for a decade. We use administrative microdata from centralized university admissions in ten systems to deliver the first cross-national decomposition of the STEM gender gap into a pipeline gap (academic...

We examine teachers’ perceptions toward top performing students and their role model influence on others in an online survey-based experiment. We randomly expose teachers to profiles of top performing students and inquire whether they consider the profiled top performers to be influential role...

Understanding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on education requires a solid grasp of the impact of student autonomy on learning. In this paper, we estimate the effect of an increased autonomy policy for higher-performing students on short- and longer-term school outcomes. We exploit an...

How much does your neighbor impact your test scores and career? In this paper, we examine how an observable characteristic of same-age neighbors - their gender - affects a variety of high school and university outcomes. We exploit randomness in the gender composition of local cohorts at birth...

How can individuals respond to their ordinal ranking when they are not aware of it? We present evidence on the effects and mechanisms of achievement rank effects in middle schools when ranks are salient to students and their parents. For identification, we rely on the random assignment of...

How do disruptive peers shape academic and career paths? We examine this question by leveraging the random assignment of students to classrooms in Greece and identifying the effects of peer disruptiveness on academic performance and career paths. Using suspension hours as a measure of...

Recent research has shown that females make classrooms more conducive to effective learning. We identify the effect of a higher share of female classmates on students' disruptive behavior, engagement, test scores, and major choices in disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged schools. We exploit the...

Using Greek administrative data, we examine the impact of being randomly assigned to a classroom with a same-gender top-performing student on both short- and long-term educational outcomes. These top performers are tasked with keeping classroom attendance records, which positions them as role...

Recent political instability in the Middle East has triggered one of the largest influxes of refugees into Europe. The different departure points along the Turkish coast generate exogenous variation in refugee arrivals across Greek islands. We construct a new dataset on the number and nature of...