We investigate the impact of attending a free school in England - that is, a new start-up school that enjoys considerable autonomy while remaining in the state sector. We analyse the effects of two secondary free schools with different teaching philosophies: one follows a "no excuse" paradigm,...

This paper analyses the effects of independent-school competition on Sweden's performance in TIMSS, an international low-stakes test in mathematics and science among students in year 8. Exploiting variation in independent-school enrolment shares across counties over time, it finds that...

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Sweden dismantled an education system that was strongly influenced by German, Neo-Humanist pedagogical principles in favor of a progressive, student-centered system. This article suggests this was in large part due to a fatal misinterpretation of the...

Research indicates that education quality - measured by test scores in international student surveys - predicts economic growth. In this paper, we extend previous findings up to 2016 and analyse test scores of upper-secondary school students only. We find that the positive relationship between...

This paper analyses the short- and long-term effects of retirement on mental health in ten European countries. It exploits thresholds created by regular state pension ages in a fuzzy regression-discontinuity design combined with individual-fixed effects to deal with endogeneity in retirement...

This paper analyses the short- and longer-term effects of retirement on mental health in ten European countries. It exploits thresholds created by state pension ages in an individual-fixed effects instrumental-variable set-up, borrowing intuitions from the regression-discontinuity design...

Research indicates that education quality – measured by test scores ininternational student surveys – predicts economic growth. In this paper, we extendprevious findings up to 2016 and analyse test scores of upper-secondary school studentsonly. We find that the positive relationship between...

Declining fertility rates and increasing life expectancy necessitate a higher labor participation rate among older people in order to sustain pension systems and boost economic growth. At the same time, researchers have only recently begun to pay attention to the health effects of a longer...