This paper examines the distributional impacts of direct college costs - that is, whether the response of educational decisions to college costs varies by student characteristics. The primary obstacle in estimating these effects is the endogeneity of schooling costs. To overcome this issue, I...

The federal government's Race to the Top competition has promoted the adoption of test-based performance measures as a component of teacher evaluations throughout many states, but the validity of these measures has been controversial among researchers and widely contested by teachers' unions. A...

This paper studies the effect of teacher expectations on essay grades in an experimental setting. To this purpose, we randomly assign Turkish or German first names to a set of essays so that some teachers believe a given essay was written by a German native pupil, whereas others believe it was...

Swedish elementary school children stopped receiving written end of year report cards following a grading reform in 1982. Gradual implementation of the reform creates an opportunity to investigate the effects of being graded on adult educational attainments and earnings for children in the...

Several studies have shown that body height is positively associated with educational attainment. In this paper, we investigate the mechanisms behind this relationship using data on German pre-teen students. We show that (i) taller children are more likely to enroll in 'Gymnasium', the most...

Swedish elementary school children stopped receiving written end of year report cards following a grading reform in 1982. Gradual implementation of the reform creates an opportunity to investigate the effects of being graded on adult educational attainments and earnings for children in the...

In this paper, we provide new evidence on the effect of part-time work on postsecondary educational attainment. To do so, we use samples extracted from the French Labor Force Surveys conducted over the years 1992-2002. These samples are restricted to students in initial education following...

Using a specific micro-dataset with information on working histories, we analyse the labour market entry of Spanish youths who have completed vocational education. According to the education system, young people can enter the labour market with vocational high school (upper secondary education)...

This paper surveys the trends in gender gaps in education, their causes and potential policy implications. I show that female educational attainment has surpassed, or is about to surpass, male educational attainment in most industrialized countries. These gaps reflect male overrepresentation...

Many countries use centralized exit exams as a governance devise of the school system. While abundant evidence suggests positive effects of central exams on achievement tests, previous research on university-bound students shows no effects on subsequent earnings. We suggest that labor-market...