This paper estimates the impact of the use of structured methods on the quality of education for students in primary public school in Brazil. Structured methods encompass a range of pedagogical and managerial instruments applied in the educational system. In recent years, several municipalities...

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...

Nineteen percent of 1997–98 North Carolina 3rd graders were observed to drop out of high school. A series of logits predict probabilities of dropping out on determinants such as math and reading test scores, absenteeism, suspension, and retention, at the following grade levels: 3rd, 5th, 8th,...

Exploiting variation in welfare reform across states and over time and using relevant comparison groups, this study estimates the effects of welfare reform on an important source of human capital acquisition among women at risk for relying on welfare: vocational education and training. The...

This paper examines the effects of a compositional shift in a school’s testing population brought about by the elimination of special education testing exemptions. The policy change forced schools to add varying levels of generally low-achieving students to their testing pools, altering...

This paper investigates the relative role of family wealth and other family characteristics in determining schooling decisions. Instead of employing a common approach that focuses on certain education levels, an alternative method is proposed that allows a study of the entire schooling...

Despite increasing access to university education, students from disadvantaged or non-academic family backgrounds are still underrepresented in universities. In this regard, the economics literature has focused on the role of financial constraints as a cause of these observed differences in...

This paper estimates future adult earnings effects associated with a universal pre-K program in Tulsa, Oklahoma. These projections help to compensate for the lack of long-term data on universal pre-K programs, while using metrics that relate test scores to social benefits. Combining test-score...

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...

Curriculum tracking creates incentives in the years before its start, and we should therefore expect test scores to be higher during those years. I find robust evidence for incentive effects of tracking in the UK based on the UK comprehensive school reform. Results from the Swedish comprehensive...