A review of the measures of the stock of human capital used in empiricalgrowth research - including adult literacy rates, school enrollmentratios, and average years of schooling of the working-age population -reveals that human capital is mostly poorly proxied. The simple use ofthe most common...

Trade and growth theories predict a mutual causation of innovation and exports. We test empirically whether innovation causes exports using a uniquely rich German micro dataset. Our instrumental-variable strategy identifies variation in innovative activity that is caused by specific impulses and...

Research increasingly stresses the role of human capital in modern economic development. Existing historical evidence-mostly from British textile industries-however, rejects that formal education was important for the Industrial Revolution. Our new evidence from technological follower Prussia...

School choice research mostly focuses on academic outcomes. Policymakers increasingly view entrepreneurial traits as a non-cognitive outcome important for economic growth. We use international PISA-2006 student-level data to estimate the effect of private-school competition on students’...

This article presents evidence on the associations between family background, school characteristics and student performance in primary school in Argentina, Colombia and several comparison countries. As a general pattern, educational performance is strongly related to family background, weakly...

Education policy-makers and practitioners want to know which policies and practices can best achieve their goals. But research that can inform evidence-based policy often requires complex methods to distinguish causation from accidental association. Avoiding econometric jargon and technical...

Existing growth research provides little explanation for the very large differences in long-run growth performance across OECD countries. We show that cognitive skills can account for growth differences within the OECD, whereas a range of economic institutions and quantitative measures of...

This paper uses extensive student-level micro databases of three international student achievement tests to estimate heterogeneity in the effect of external exit examinations on student performance along three dimensions. First, quantile regressions show that the effect tends to increase with...

We provide a measure of equality of educational opportunity in 54 countries, estimated as the effect of family background on student performance in two international TIMSS tests. Using cross-country variation in education policies and its interaction with family background at the student level,...