This study of the emergence of inequality during the early years is based upon a comparative analysis of children at the age of about five years in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. We study a series of child outcomes related to readiness to learn, focusing on...

Using the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates, I examine how immigrants perform relative to natives in activities likely to increase U.S. productivity, according to the type of visa on which they first entered the United States. Immigrants who first entered on a student/trainee visa or a...

We aim to disentangle the relative contributions of (i) cognitive ability, and (ii) education on health and mortality using a structural equation model suggested by Conti et al. (2010). We extend their model by allowing for a duration dependent variable, and an ordinal educational variable. Data...

This paper studies the effects of enrollment in an elite school on students’ achievement. We use that elite schools in Amsterdam are often oversubscribed and admission is based on lotteries. Our results show that elite schools have negative effects on achievement of students who just...

We combine data from the Amsterdam secondary-school match with register data and survey data to estimate the effects of not being assigned to one's first-ranked school on academic outcomes and on a wide range of other outcomes. For identification we use that secondaryschool assignment in...

Private school students do not always perform better in standardized tests. We suggest that this may be explained by choice of private schooling by less capable students in countries where government schools are better suited to talented students. To assess the empirical relevance of this...

Forty years of low-intensity internal armed conflict has made Colombia home to the world's second largest population of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). The effect of being directly impacted by conflict on a child's educational accumulation and enrollment is of particular concern because of...

We extend the analysis of early-emerging gender differences in academic achievement to include both (objective) test scores and (subjective) teacher assessments. Using data from the 1998-99 ECLS-K cohort, we show that the grades awarded by teachers are not aligned with test scores, with the...

The existence of gender gaps in test scores has been documented in the relevant literature for a wide range of countries. In particular, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) conducted by the OECD over the past ten years reveals that on average female students underperform...