Among policymakers, educators and economists there remains a strong, sometimes heated, debate on the extent to which good schools matter. This is seen, for instance, in the strong trend towards establishing accountability systems in education in many countries across the world. In this paper, in...

This paper uses a unique data set to investigate the link betweenthe pay and performance of school principals. It is frequently arguedthat public sector CEOs are paid like bureaucrats with little rewardfor good performance. However, this ignores the possibility of implicitlabor market...

We study the origins of what has become one of the most radical and encompassing programmes of school reform seen in the recent past amongst advanced countries – the introduction of academy schools to English secondary education. Academies are state schools that are allowed to run in an...