In the past decade there has been a minor revolution in how local services are funded.Those delivering the services now have their own budgets. How these budgets arecalculated – how Whitehall pulls the purse strings – are now central issues in social policy.In a new book, CASE members...

A broad literature seeks to assess the importance of schools, proxies for school quality, andfamily background on children's achievement growth using the education production function.Using rich data from the Philippines, we introduce and estimate a model that imposes littlestructure on the...

We describe a new and flexible framework for modeling school effects. Like previouswork in this area, we introduce an empirical model that evaluates school performance onthe basis of student level test-score gains. Unlike previous work, however, we introducea flexible model that relates...

School autonomy and parental participation have been frequently proposed as ways of making schools more productive. Less clear is how governments can foster decentralized decision-making by local schools. This paper shows that across eight Latin-American countries, most of the variation in local...

This paper reviews the issues surrounding the derivation of estimates of the impact of child labor on school outcomes. The paper aims to review the current state of methodological and empirical knowledge concerning the impact of child labor on learning, to review existing data sets that could be...

Bildung für eine nachhaltige Entwicklung (BNE) scheint auf dem Vormarsch zu sein, wennauch nicht mit hoher Geschwindigkeit. Diese Beobachtung wird durch den Stellenwert, denThemen und Aspekte der BNE in 150 zufällig ausgewählten schulischen Selbstdarstellungenhaben, belegt. Fast die Hälfte...

Child labor's effect on academic achievement is estimated, using unique data on 3rd and 4th graders in 9 Latin American countries. Cross-country variation in truancy regulations provides an exogenous shift in the ages of children normally in these grades, providing exogenous variation in...

[...]What might account for this link between parentalincome and children’s income? Many economists believethat this relationship is due in large part to differentialhuman-capital investment between high-income andlow-income families. High-income parents can invest inmore (and better)...

[...]This paper analyzes the current state of the educationsystem in the United States. In the course of the paper, Iwill try to point out where controversy exists, particularlyin academic discussions.[...]

[...]The main conclusion from this review is that thewidely held belief that American schools have failed—thatthey are performing worse today than they have in the past,that a high school degree is no longer valuable, and thatadditional resources yield no benefits in the current system—is...