Despite the relatively uncontested importance of promoting school attendance in the policy arena, little evidence exists on the causal effect of school absence on long-run socio-economic outcomes. We address this question by combining historical and administrative records for cohorts of Swedish...

We use a new empirical strategy to test various measures of school effectiveness in England. Our approach exploits discontinuities in attendance probabilities that occur at unpredictable distance cutoffs used as tiebreakers in admissions processes for oversubscribed schools. We show that raw,...

Are teachersʼ impacts on studentsʼ test scores ("value-added") a good measure of their quality? One reason this question has sparked debate is disagreement about whether value-added (VA) measures provide unbiased estimates of teachersʼ causal impacts on student achievement. We test for bias...

We estimate the impact of charter schools on early-life labor market outcomes using administrative data from Texas. We find that, at the mean, charter schools have no impact on test scores and a negative impact on earnings. No Excuses charter schools increase test scores and four-year college...

This paper extends the traditional test-score value-added model of teacher quality to allow for the possibility that teachers affect a variety of student outcomes through their effects on both students' cognitive and noncognitive skill. Results show that teachers have effects on skills not...

In a widely cited study, Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (2014a; hereafter CFR) evaluate the degree of bias in teacher value-added estimates using a novel "teacher switching" research design with data from New York City. They conclude that there is little to no bias in their estimates. Using the same...

This paper brings new evidence on the impact of The Peruvian Job Youth Training Program (Projoven). Compared with prior evaluations of the program, this one has several advantages. This is the first experimental impact evaluation of Projoven, and also the first to measure impacts over a longer...

Job training programs can be an eective policy for improving productivity and labor market outcomes in low and middle income countries. We report medium and long-term impacts of a job training program for vulnerable workers in Chile on labor market and skill outcomes using experimental and...

Low salaries, a limited amount of full-time teaching positions, and alternative systems of allocating teaching hours lead teachers to look for additional jobs in other schools. Although this is a more common phenomenon of teacher labor markets in developing countries, teachers who teach specific...