This study examines the gendered effects of early and sustained exposure to high-performing peers on female educational trajectories. Exploiting random allocation to classrooms within middle schools, we measure the effect of male and female high performers on girls' high school placement...

This paper analyses job advertisements to identify the particular skills, abilities and characteristics that are in demand on the Austrian labour market. It takes a novel approach and uses information extracted from over 1.5 million job advertisements over the past 15 years from Austria's...

An instrumental variables (IV) identification strategy that exploits statutory class size caps shows significant achievement gains in smaller classes in Italian primary schools. Gains from small classes are driven mainly by schools in Southern Italy, suggesting a substantial return to class size...

This paper analyzes the effect of educational mismatch on wages, using a rich panel dataset of workers in the major euro area countries from 2006 to 2009, drawn from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (Eurostat). We use a consistent estimator to address the two...

This paper presents evidence of the relationship between the disparity in the academic performance of boys and girls in Colombia and the country s excessively high school dropout rates. By using the OLS and trimming for bounds techniques, and based on data derived from the PISA 2009 database,...

Using administrative data from the urban Mexican Oportunidades program, this paper analyzes why poor households choose less education for their children, even when offered financial compensation for school attendance. Each school year, half of recipients forgo income for which they are eligible...

This paper studies a model where student effort and talent interact with parental and teachers' investments, as well as with school system resources. The model is rich, yet sufficiently stylized to provide novel implications. It can show, for example, that an improvement in parental outside...

This paper designs and implements a field experiment that provides students from less advantaged backgrounds with individualized feedback on academic performance during the transition from middle to high school. The intervention reduces the gap between expected and actual performance, as well as...

Despite the renewed interest in technical education, only a handful of studies analyze its effect on academic outcomes. In this paper we apply a regression discontinuity design to oversubscribed technical high school tracks in Pernambuco, Brazil, to identify the impact of technical education...

This paper examines the effects of skill advantages at age six on different types of parental investments, and long-run outcomes up to age 27. We exploit exogenous variation in skills due to school entry rules, combining 20 years of Chilean administrative records with a regression discontinuity...