Outside the United States, very little is known about long-run trends in school productivity. We present new evidence using two data series from Australia, where comparable tests are available back to the 1960s. For young teenagers (aged 13–14), we find a small but statistically significant...

International research suggests that differences in teacher performance can explain a large portion of student achievement. Yet little is known about how the quality of the Australian teaching profession has changed over time. Using consistent data on the academic aptitude of new teachers, we...

Outside the United States (U.S.), very little is known about long-run trends in school productivity. We present new evidence using two data series from Australia, where comparable tests are available back to the 1960s. For young teenagers (aged 13-14), we find a small but statistically...

How much do returns to education differ across different natural experiment methods? To test this, we estimate the rate of return to schooling in Australia using two different instruments for schooling: month of birth and changes in compulsory schooling laws. With annual pre-tax income as our...

We compare three quasi-experimental approaches to estimating the returns to schooling in Australia: instrumenting schooling using month of birth, instrumenting schooling using changes in compulsory schooling laws, and comparing outcomes for twins. With annual pre-tax income as our measure of...

"International research suggests that differences in teacher performance can explain a large portion of student achievement. Yet little is known about how the quality of the Australian teaching profession has changed over time. Using consistent data on the academic aptitude of new teachers, we...