It is still taken for granted that (early) ability tracking increases the impact of social origin on achievement in (lower) secondary education, but without gains in the overall level. This contribution addresses the question of whether this common conviction is really correct. The various...

This paper investigates if better access to secondary education increases enrolment in primary schools among children in the 6-10 age group. Using a household-level longitudinal survey covering 43 villages in a poor state in India, we find support for the hypothesis that better access to...

This paper investigates if better access to secondary education increases enrolment in primary schools among children in the 6-10 age group. Using a household-level longitudinal survey covering 43 villages in a poor state in India, we find support for the hypothesis that better access to...

We examine whether parental and school investments reinforce or compensate for student performance. Our analysis exploits school-starting-age rules in 34 countries, capturing achievement variation that arises because younger children typically underperform their older peers. Parents respond to...

We exploit a recent state-level reform in Germany that granted parents the right to decide on the highest secondary school track suitable for their child, changing the purpose of the primary teacher's recommendation from mandatory to informational. Applying a disaggre-gated synthetic control...

This paper analyzes how changes in school expenditures affect dropout rates and standardized test scores based on data from 465 school districts in New York during the 2003/04 to the 2008/09 school years. Past traditional regression approaches show inconsistent results of school expenditures...

This paper analyzes how changes in school expenditures affect dropout rates and standardized test scores based on data from 465 school districts in New York during the 2003/04 to the 2008/09 school years. Past traditional regression approaches show inconsistent results of school expenditures...

We study the origins of what has become one of the most radical and encompassing programmes of school reform seen in the recent past amongst advanced countries - the introduction of academy schools to English secondary education. Academies are state schools that are allowed to run in an...

This paper investigates how the precision and stability of a teacher's value-added estimate relates to the characteristics of the teacher's students. Using a large administrative data set and a variety of teacher value-added estimators, it finds that the stability over time of teacher...

This paper studies whether pupil performance gains in autonomous schools in England can be attributed to the strategic exclusion of poorly performing pupils. In England there were two phases of academy school introduction, the first in the 2000s being a school improvement programme for poorly...