This paper examines critically the presumption that, other things equal, private schooling offers higher quality education than public schooling. We apply multilevel regression on the 2009 PISA to estimate the differential effect of public and private schooling on student scores in Australia. We...

Lottery estimates suggest oversubscribed urban charter schools boost student achievement markedly. But these estimates needn't capture treatment effects for students who haven't applied to charter schools or for students attending charters for which demand is weak. This paper reports estimates...

Extant research on school entry and compulsory schooling laws finds that these policies increase the high school graduation rate of relatively younger students, but weaken their academic performance in early grades. In this paper, we explore the evolution of postsecondary impacts of the...

In this paper, we examine the wage returns to an extra year of primary school using a policy reform in Egypt, which reduced compulsory primary schooling from 6 to 5 years. Since this policy changed the duration of primary school while providing the same diploma, we can estimate the human capital...

In an experiment in non-formal schools in Indian slums, an incentive for attending a target number of school days increased average attendance when the incentive was in place, but had heterogeneous effects after it was removed. Among students with high baseline attendance, the post-incentive...

The idea that schooling scores depend on a combination of family background characteristics, ability and school (institutional) variables is quite clear. Regarding the issue of intergenerational transmission of inequality in the educational system, the most important question would be if and to...

Grouping students by ability is a controversial issue, and its impacts are likely to depend on the type of tracking students are exposed to. This paper studies a reform that moved French schools from a rigorous tracking system, which assigned students to tracks with significantly different...

This study combines household survey data from the Beninese Demographic and Health Survey with school supply statistics in order to investigate regional and gender disparities in primary school attendance rates in Benin. Despite almost unparalleled increases in enrolment since the 1990s, Benin...

The publication of the OECD report on the PISA 2000 study induced a public outcry in Germany. On average, German students participating in this standardized test performed considerably below the OECD average and substantially worse than those of other European countries, like Finland or Ireland....

The majority of empirical papers in the literature on school quality finds no or only small effects of class size and other school quality measures on students' outcomes. This paper analyses the effect of achievement heterogeneity and therefore the effect of the composition rather than the pure...