This study aims to identify the main determinants of student performance in reading and maths across eight European Union countries (Austria, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Slovakia, and Slovenia). Based on student-level data from the OECD’s PISA 2018 survey and by means of the...

Using longitudinal data from the Italian National Institute for the Evaluation of the Education System (INVALSI), this paper investigates whether the ability of classmates affects the educational attainment of immigrant students. We focus not only on the average quality of peers in the class,...

Schools are ripe for policy intervention. We demonstrate that implementing different teaching practices is effective, finding a greater prevalence of group discussion used in schools positively affects students’ life satisfaction and noncognitive skills but has no impact on test scores. The...

We examine the educational spillover effects of migrant students on local students' academic achievement in public middle schools in urban China. The identification of peer effects relies on idiosyncratic variation in the proportion of migrant students across classes within schools. We find that...

To study the causal impact of smartphone use on academic performance, we collected - for the first time worldwide - longitudinal data on students' smartphone use and educational performance. For three consecutive years we surveyed all students attending classes in eleven different study...

Using census data on three cohorts of 5th grade Italian students we investigate how the ordinal rank in the within-school age distribution affects the probability of being bullied. Identification is achieved by exploiting within-school between-cohort variation in the age composition of different...

Peacetime military service has both positive and negative effects on human capital. While it depreciates academic abilities it also enhances non-cognitive skills. The net effect of conscription is hard to identify due to issues of self-selection, endogenous timing and omitted variables bias. We...

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 examine the role of teachers and students in the formation of grade 12 test scores in public schools in Delhi. There is substantial variation in teacher and student quality within schools. Over the period spanning grades 11 and 12, being taught by a standard deviation better than average...

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in significant disruption in schooling worldwide. This paper uses global test score data to estimate learning losses. It models the effect of school closures on achievement by predicting the deviation of the most recent results from a linear trend using data from...