Latin American economic development has been perceived as a puzzle. The region has trailed most other world regions over the past half century despite relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle, however, can be resolved by considering educational achievement, a...

Martin Luther urged each town to have a girls’ school so that girls would learn to read the Gospel, thereby evoking a surge of building girls’ schools in Protestant areas. Using county- and town-level data from the first Prussian census of 1816, we show that a larger share of Protestants...

Many parts of Europe were ruled by large empires in the past. After their dissolution did these empires leave behind a legacy of governmental institutions? Sascha O. Becker, University of Warwick, Katrin Boeckh, Regensburg Eastern Europe Institute, Christa Hainz and Ludger Woessmann examine how...

Cross-country evidence on student achievement might be hampered byomitted country characteristics such as language or legal differences.This paper uses cross-state variation in Germany, whose sixteen statesshare the same language and legal system, but pursue different educationpolicies....

Durch das Konjunkturpaket und den Hochschulpakt fließen in den nächsten Jahren große Investitionsbeträge in die Bildung. Fraglich bleibt allerdings, ob es im Bildungsbereich auf mehr Finanzmittel ankommt. Reformbedarf besteht wohl eher bei den Strukturen des Bildungswesens und der Qualität...

The relative roles of factor inputs and productivity are estimated in explaining the level of economic development. For a large sample of countries, it is shown that international differences in factor inputs account for between two thirds and three quarters of international differences in...

This paper estimates the effects of family background, resources and institutions on mathematics and science performance using an international database of more than 260,000 students from 39 countries which includes extensive background information at the student, teacher, school and system...