East Asian students regularly take top positions in international league tables of educational performance. Using internationally comparable student-level data, I estimate how family background and schooling policies affect student performance in five high-performing East Asian economies. Family...

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

We estimate the effect of class size on student performance in 18 countries, combining school fixed effects and instrumental variables to identify random class-size variation between two adjacent grades within individual schools. Conventional estimates of class-size effects are shown to be...