We use administrative panel data on about a quarter of a million students in the German state of Hesse to estimate the causal effect of class size on school tracking outcomes after elementary school. Our identification strategy relies on the quasi-random assignment of students to different class...

This paper analyzes the relationship between education and health outcomes using a natural experiment in Turkey. The compulsory schooling increased from 5 to 8 years in 1997. This increase was accompanied by a massive construction of classrooms and recruitment of teachers in a differential rate...

This paper surveys the theoretical approaches used in the literature to study the phenomenon of delayed graduation and university dropout. The classical human capital model does not contemplate failure, which the amended human capital model does. Delayed graduation and university dropout are two...

Increased education affects market and non-market outcomes. This paper investigates the causal impact of the extension of compulsory education from 6 to 9 years on females' education, marriage, and fertility outcomes in Thailand. Using data from the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) and a...

Education is a fundamental human right and it is a global Sustainable Development Goal to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education for all.” Many children with disabilities in low-income countries, however, continue to be excluded from educational opportunities at great cost to...

We evaluate the impact of introducing a pre-primary schooling program in government schools in the Indian state of West Bengal in 2013 on children’s early enrollment in schools and subsequent test scores. Using double difference, triple difference, and synthetic control methodologies, we find...

Providing income support to unemployed education-leavers reduces the returns to investments in education because it makes the consequences of unemployment less severe. We evaluate a two-part policy reform in Belgium to study whether conditioning the prospective entitlement to unemployment...

We evaluate a political reform in Portugal that introduced individual teacher performancerelated pay and tournaments in public schools. We find that the focus on individual performance decreased student achievement, as measured in national exams, and increased grade inflation. The results follow...

The Italian economy performs well below the EU average. The reason is a dramatic and persistent low rate of investment, always invoked but never supported by national and supra-national institutions. However, investment to increase the quantity and quality of human capital is key to boost...

Despite significant improvement in female schooling over the last two decades, only a small proportion of women in South Asia are in wage employment. We revisit this puzzle using a nationally representative data set from Bangladesh. Probit regression results show that even after accounting for...