Early school-leaving is considered to be one of the major problems in Dutch education. In order to reduce the number of dropouts in the school year 2006-2007 the Dutch government has offered a financial incentive scheme to 14 out of 39 regions. This scheme provides a reward of 2000 euro per...

This paper investigates the question whether crime reduces investment in human capital or whether education reduces criminal activity by using fixed effect estimation on data of Australian twins. The study takes genetic and socio-economic factors shared by the twins into account. We find that...

This study provides the first estimates of the causal effect of time in school on cognitive skills for many countries around the world, for multiple age groups and for multiple subjects. These estimates enable a comparison of the performance of education systems based on gain scores instead of...

This paper investigates the effect of coaching in vocational education on school dropout using data from a randomized experiment. We find that one year of coaching reduces school dropout by more than 40 percent from 17 to 10 percentage points. The reduction in school dropout results from two...

This paper examines the causal link that runs from classroom quality to student achievement using data on twin pairs who entered the same school but were allocated to different classrooms in an exogenous way. In particular, we apply twin fixed-effects estimation to assess the effect of teacher...

In many Dutch cities there are Geert Groote schools. This is no coincidence, because Geert Groote's (1340-1384) ideas form the foundation of modern education in the Netherlands and many other countries. Much less known is that his investments, and those of his followers, have put the...

This paper evaluates the effects of a special program designed to increase school enrolment and employment among multi-problem youths. Treated youths are guided by personal coaches and receive a comprehensive treatment of educational, work, and health services. We investigate the impact of the...

This paper examines the impact of early tracking on enrollment in and completion of higher education. We compare pupils that are directly tracked in lower general secondary education (‘mavo’) to pupils that postpone their choice of education level by entering secondary education in...

A shortage of teachers in primary and secondary schools in the Netherlands is expected in the near future as a large part of the current workforce will retire. Recently, the Dutch government has decided to increase wages of teachers. This paper qualitatively assesses the impact of three...

Inspectors from the Dutch Inspectorate of Education inspect primary schools, write inspection reports on each inspected school, and make recommendations as to how each school can improve. We test whether these inspections result in better school performance. Using a fixed-effects model, we...