In 2014, the government of Colombia launched a unique meanstested and merit-based scholarship program called Ser Pilo Paga. We examine the effects of this scholarship on student performance on the country's university exit exam and other educational outcomes. Exploiting thresholds for...

There is a well-established socioeconomic gradient in cognitive test scores for children. This gradient emerges at very early ages and there is also some evidence that it can widen as children age. We investigate this phenomenon with two longitudinal cohorts of Irish children who take such tests...

This paper complements a much larger study of school attendance in pre-famine Ireland by FitzGerald (2010). It exploits some of the data generated by that study to analyze further some of the determinants of schooling and literacy in the 1820s and 1840s. -- Ireland ; Economic history ; Literacy...

While much empirical work concerns job tenure, this paper introduces the concept of school tenure - the length of time one student has been in a given school. I examine whether and how school tenure impacts students' output using rich cohort data on England's secondary schools. Ordinary Least...

In recent years there has been a plethora of empirical papers by economists concerning the effects of academic rank in school or college on subsequent outcomes of students. We review this recent literature, describing the difficult identification and measurement issues, the assumptions and...

Evidence on a causal link between family size and children’s education, as in the tradeoff suggested by Gary S. Becker between child quantity and quality, is still inconclusive. Recent empirical studies have focused heavily on China, exploiting for identification the country’s One-Child...