High school students, across the world, prepare for college by participating in shadow education. Despite substantial investments in shadow education, however, little is known about whether it helps students prepare for college. The goal of our study is to provide rigorous evidence about the...

This study examines the relationship between teaching practices aimed at raising student performance on a high stakes college entrance examination—the Russian Unified State Exam (USE) — and student performance on that test. The study uses data from a school/classroom survey of almost 3,000...

This paper focuses on the changing economic value of secondary and higher education in four potential world economic powerhouses—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—known as the BRIC countries. We show that in the past twenty-five years in the BRIC countries, changes in rates of return to...