In this inaugural lecture, I will estimate the effects on language skills of two characteristics of school populations: average/share and diversity, both on the ethnic and the sociocultural dimension. I will use the cross-national PISA 206 data, for both 15-year-old native pupils and pupils with...

This paper presents a counterfactual decomposition of the public–private gap on test scores obtained by 8th graders in Brazil. Quantile regression methods are used to obtain a characterization of the conditional distribution of scores, which is then used to build counterfactuals. The results...

El Programa PISA para la Evaluación Internacional de los Alumnos consiste en una valoración de los conocimientos adquiridos por los estudiantes de 15 años en los países de la OCDE y asociados. La evaluación, realizada con una periodicidad trienal, mide las capacidades ectivamente adquiridas...

We use a national Brazilian test (SAEB) and an international test (PISA) to measure whether Brazilian students 13-15 years old improved their mathematics and language learning in1995-2012. We control for part of out-of-school influences by comparing test scores for students with similar family...

The main research question of this paper is the combined estimation of the effects of educational systems, school composition, track level, and country of origin on the educational achievement of 15-year-old migrant students. We focus specifically on the effects of socioeconomic and ethnic...

This paper evaluates average educational performance effects of an expanding independent- school sector at the compulsory level by assessing a radical voucher reform that was implemented in Sweden in 1992. Starting from a situation where all public schools were essentially local monopolists, the...

Previous research provided ambiguous results on the association between average student performance and inequality of opportunity, as measured by the effect of family background on student achievement. In this paper we explore this association distinguishing between inequality of opportunity at...

Interactions between observed and unobserved determinants of educational success imply that the former have a heterogeneous effect on performance. To quantify these interactions, a quantile regression model is estimated using a database of students at public universities in Argentina. The...

Previous research provided ambiguous results on the association between average student performance and inequality of opportunity measured by the effect of family background on student achievement. In this paper we explore this association distinguishing between inequality of opportunity at the...

The aim of this paper is to investigate and understand the effect of high-school friends on years of schooling. We develop a simple network model where students first choose their friends and then decide how much effort they put in education. The empirical salience of the model is tested using...