"There has been a remarkable upsurge of debate about increasing inequalities and their societal implications, reinforced by the economic crisis but bubbling to the surface before it. This has been seen in popular discourse, media coverage, political debate, and research in the social sciences....

We review the comparative literature on the impact of national-level educational institutions on inequality in student achievement. We focus on two types of institutions that characterize the educational system of a country: the system of school-type differentiation (between-school tracking) and...

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, I present a novel instrumental variable strategy to allow researchers to study the consequences of state policy liberalism in panel data. Second, I study the consequences of state policy liberalism on education and inequality from the 1940s to 2014....