This paper provides new estimates of the effect of Catholic school attendance on high school completion and university commencement and completion for Australian students. Without a set of robust instruments to deal with any potential selection bias, we place bounds on the Catholic school effect...

Is it possible to compress instruction time into fewer school years without lowering education levels? A fundamental reform in Germany reduced the length of academic track schooling by one year, while increasing instruction hours in the remaining school years to provide students with a very...

In this paper, I estimate the differential effects of compulsory schooling laws on school quality between black and white schools in the United States segregated South. I employ state-level data on length of school terms and pupil–teacher ratios to examine these responses. Other literature has...

Over the last decade many districts implemented performance pay incentives to reward teachers for improving student achievement. Economic theory suggests that these programs could alter teacher work effort, cooperation, and retention. Because teachers can choose to work in a performance pay...

Using data from a randomized experiment and fixed effect quantile regression (FEQR), we examine the effects of having a TFA teacher on test scores across the entire achievement distribution of primary school students in disadvantaged neighborhoods. While we generally find that TFA teachers...

This paper estimates ability peer effects on achievement growth in reading and math. It exploits variation in peer characteristics generated at the transition from primary to secondary school in a sample of Berlin fifth-graders. As will be discussed in detail, this variation is exogenous in...

Australian school student achievement in reading and mathematical literacy has fallen in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) collection since 2000. This study finds that these declines were widespread in the student population, affecting both males and females. However, the...

This study exploits a unique policy environment and a large panel dataset to evaluate the impact of school crowding on student achievement in Wake County, NC. We also estimate the effects of two education policy initiatives that are often used to address crowding: multi-track year-round...

We investigate short and long-term effects of early childhood education using variation created by a policy experiment in British Columbia, Canada. Our findings imply being in kindergarten longer increases the probability of repeating the third grade, and decreases tenth grade math and reading...

One quarter of all schoolchildren in Latvia go to the publicly funded minority (predominantly Russian) schools. In 2004, the language of instruction in minority schools was changed from essentially minority language to a composite of 60% Latvian and 40% minority. This paper studies the effects...