This paper examines the effect of working during higher education on academic progression, in terms of number of credits acquired by first-year university students in Italy. We discuss different contrasting hypotheses on the role of employment during university on academic outcomes: the zero-sum...

In OECD countries, ‘real world’ upper-secondary vocational education and training (VET) programs are used to engage less academically oriented youth in learning, while helping to prepare them for post-school work and/or further education. In general terms, VET programs with high employer...

A lengthy literature estimating the returns to education has largely ignored the for-profit sector. In this paper, we estimate the earnings gains to for-profit college attendance using restricted-access data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97). Using an individual fixed...

The high stakes testing and school accountability components of our K-12 education system create an incentive for principals to behave strategically to maximize school performance. One possible approach is the adjustment of class sizes based on observed teacher effectiveness. Conceptually, this...

The High Schools That Work school improvement initiative is the nation's largest comprehensive school reform model with over a thousand schools adopting its framework. The initiative's premise is that all students can meet the demands of a college preparatory curriculum if provided the right...

We identify the effect of individual high school principals on graduation rates and English exam scores using an administrative data set of grade 12 students in BC Canada. Many principals were rotated across schools by districts, permitting isolation of the effect of principals from the effect...

Of particular importance for education policy-makers is the possibility that teacher mobility adversely affects the quality of teaching in schools serving mainly disadvantaged and minority children. This paper examines the main drivers of the mobility of Italian teachers by using...

This paper examines the earnings returns to learning that takes place following the conventional ‘school-to-work’ stage of the life-course. We operationalise such ‘lifelong learning’ as the attainment of certified qualifications in adulthood, following the completion of the first period...

In most elementary schools, teachers are responsible for several subjects. Various personnel policies, such as evaluating teachers based on value-added estimates aggregated across subjects or departmentalizing teachers, implicitly make assumptions about how closely teacher effectiveness is...

Grade inflation over the past few decades has been a concern for many universities. Course evaluation scores are known to be positively correlated with students’ expected grades, and this paper tests whether or not there is an incentive for the instructor to “buy” higher evaluation scores...