This paper investigates the effectiveness of private tutoring in Turkey. The authors introduce their study by providing some background information on the two major national examinations and three different kinds of tutoring. They then describe how they aimed to analyse whether attending private...

We conduct a field experiment studying how financial incentives for achieving specific course grades affect university students, whether effects vary by ability, and whether allowing students to choose their goals improves outcomes. We find that incentives negatively affect performance,...

This paper is the first to use a randomized trial in the US to analyze the short- and long-term educational and employment impacts of an after-school program, the Quantum Opportunity Program, that offered disadvantaged high-school youth: mentoring, educational services, and financial rewards...

Sweden has a school voucher system with universal coverage and full acceptance of corporate providers. Using a value added approach, we find that students at upper-secondary voucher schools on average score 0.06 standard deviations lower on externally graded standardized tests in first year core...

A large school consolidation reform in the Netherlands changed minimum school size rules underlying public funding. The supply of schools decreased by 15 percent, but this varied considerably across municipalities. We find that reducing the number of schools by 10 percent increases pupils'...

This paper provides new evidence on the effect of school construction projects on home prices, academic achievement, and public school enrollment. Taking advantage of the staggered implementation of a comprehensive school construction project in a poor urban district, we find that, by six years...

This study was prepared by Gabriela Schütz while she was working with the Ifo Institute for Economic Research. It was completed in September 2008 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Economics Department of the University of Munich (LMU). The topic of this study is an econometric analysis...

Although school accountability incentives and standards, such as district-mandated goals and state sanctions for poor performance, are increasingly common, few studies have investigated their effectiveness. The author of this paper seeks evidence on whether such policies affect public secondary...

I use natural population variation to identify the effects of class size and composition on student achievement. I isolate the credibly random component of population variation in each grade and school district and use this component to generate instrumental variables for class size and...

This paper presents a theoretical model and empirical estimations to evaluate the effects of competition on school quality. Empirical estimations, using roughly 5,000 Chilean schools in the 1994-1997 period and econometric techniques robust to endogeneity, support the theoretical model and show...