It has been argued that a factor behind the decline in income inequality in Latin America in the 2000s was the educational upgrading of its labor force. Between 1990 and 2010, the proportion of the labor force in the region with at least secondary education increased from 40 to 60 percent....

The standard summary metric of education-based human capital used in macro analyses - the average number of years of schooling in a population - is based only on quantity. But ignoring schooling quality turns out to be a major omission. As recent research shows, students in different countries...

Using a rich data set of almost the entire population of Ukrainian secondary schools, the authors estimate the effect of school size and class size on the performance of secondary schools on Ukraine's External Independent Test. They find that larger schools tend to have somewhat better...

Socioeconomic segregation is often decried for denying poorer children the benefits of positive' peer effects'. Yet standard, linear-in-means models of peer effects (a) implicitly assume that segregation is zero sum, with gains and losses to rich and poor perfectly offsetting, and (b) rule out...

Large classroom variance of student age is prevalent in developing countries, where achievement tends to be low. This paper investigates whether increased classroom age variance adversely affects mathematics and science achievement. Using exogenous variation in the variance of student age in...

One of the key features of the Dutch education system is freedom of education -- freedom to establish schools and organize teaching. Almost 70 percent of schools in the Netherlands are administered by private school boards, and all schools are government funded equally. This allows school...

The relationship between school inputs and educational outcomes is critical for educational policy. The authors recognize that households will respond optimally to changes in school inputs and study how such responses affect the link between school inputs and cognitive achievement. To...

This paper examines the effects of subsidized school meals on school participation, educational achievement, and school finance in a developing country setting. The paper uses data from a program that was implemented in 25 randomly chosen preschools in a pool of 50. Children's school...

This paper studies the impact of gender and ethnicity on educational outcomes using cross-country evidence from Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. It uses the Minnesota Population Center's Integrated Public Use Microdata Series-International database, which includes...

Countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean are reforming their education systems to add more hours to the school day. This paper examines the evidence on the relationship between instructional time and student learning, reviewing 19 studies that measure the effects of longer school...