We study the effect of school closures and the transition from on-site to on-line teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic in the Finnish upper secondary schools. To identify the effects we exploit variation in the length of school closure periods across schools between autumn 2020 and spring 2021....

Many countries are experiencing increasing inflows of immigrant students. This raises concerns that having a large share of students for whom the host country language is not their first language may have detrimental effects on the educational outcomes of native children. However, the evidence...

Ample empirical evidence links adverse conditions during early childhood (the period from conception to age five) to worse health outcomes and lower academic achievement in adulthood. Can early-life medical care and public health interventions ameliorate these effects? Recent research suggests...

Zur gezielten Förderung von Wissenschaft und Forschung an den Universitäten hat die Politik 2005 die Exzellenzinitiative ins Leben gerufen. Die Gewinner des Wettbewerbs um Fördergelder wurden fortan als „Eliteuniversitäten“ bezeichnet. Der folgende Beitrag untersucht, ob die Zahl der...

The great majority of studies on the effect of school quality on academic outcomes do not take account of changes in student choices concerning effort if school quality, e.g. class size, changes. We show that empirical estimates of the "total" effect of changes in school quality could be quite...

Mit der Umsetzung der vor 15 Jahren beschlossenen Bologna-Reformen verschoben sich sowohl die Zielkoordinaten als auch die Mittel der Hochschulpolitik. Die berufliche Qualifikation Studierender rückte stärker in den Vordergrund, und es wurden neue Governance-Strukturen in Anlehnung an das neue...

This paper evaluates the impact of an intervention targeted at marginalized low-performance students in public secondary schools in Mexico City. The program consisted in offering free additional math courses, taught by undergraduate students from some of the most prestigious Mexican...

Concerns about poor student performance have led schools to diverge from traditional teacher compensation and base a portion of pay on student outcomes. In the US, the number of school districts adopting such performancebased financial incentives has increased by more than 40% since 2004....

Numerous economic studies have considered the relationship between class size and student achievement, the majority of which have focused on elementary schools in the US and Europe. While the general finding is that smaller classes are associated with increased student achievement, a few...

This paper provides the first analysis of the relationship between the language mix of Limited English Proficient (LEP) peers and student achievement, using detailed panel data from 2006 to 2012. Percent LEP has a negative association with mathematics and reading test scores, more so for non-LEP...