Although there is intense policy interest in improving educational outcomes around the world, there is much greater uncertainty about how to accomplish this. The primary governmental decisions often relate to the resources that are devoted to schooling, but the research indicates little...

Improving the quality of instruction is a central component to virtually all proposals to raise school quality. Unfortunately, policy recommendations often ignore existing evidence about teacher labor markets and the determinants of teacher effectiveness in the classroom. This chapter reviews...

An emerging economic literature over the past decade has made use of international tests of educational achievement to analyze the determinants and impacts of cognitive skills. The cross-country comparative approach provides a number of unique advantages over national studies: It can exploit...