The publication of the OECD report on the PISA 2000 study induced a public outcry in Germany. On average, German students participating in this standardized test performed considerably below the OECD average and substantially worse than those of other European countries, like Finland or Ireland....

Using the Thai PISA 2009 literacy test, this paper offers two contributions to the literature on the achievement gap between students in urban and rural areas. The first contribution relates to the estimation of the student-level education production function at different points along the...

This paper explores differences in the frequency with which students from different schools reach high levels of math achievement. Data from the American Mathematics Competitions is used to produce counts of high-scoring students from more than two thousand public, coeducational, non-magnet,...

In this paper, we study the impact of disclosing information about school quality of private schools in Brazil on school choice. Particularly, we investigate whether test score disclosure affected private schools' tuition prices. In 2006, Brazil started to announce the schools' average test...

This paper examines critically the presumption that, other things equal, private schooling offers higher quality education than public schooling. We apply multilevel regression on the 2009 PISA to estimate the differential effect of public and private schooling on student scores in Australia. We...

Concepts of new school governance did considerably change the role and responsibilities of school principals. Due to the shift in their role from administrator to manager, recent research tends to focus on management activity, but little is still known about the interrelation between changing...

This paper analyses the effect of school quality on early career earnings. Using confidential district level information from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), it is demonstrated that class size has no discernible effect on early career earnings. This finding is robust to changes in...

Have recent expansions of access to primary schooling in African countries led to deterioration in the quality of education delivered? This paper helps clarify this question by presenting an appropriate conceptual framework: instead of considering country average test scores and enrolment rates...

Recent evidence from Pakistan points to significant pro-male bias within households in the allocation of education expenditures. This raises two important questions: Is less spent on enrolled girls than boys through differential school-type choice for the two sexes, for example through a greater...

Using a primary school curricular standard basic mathematics competence test, this paper documents the low level of student achievement amongst 10-18 year old rural children in Bangladesh and tests the extent to which years spent in school increases learning. Our sample includes children...