Grade retention offers students a chance to catch up with unmastered material but also leads to less labor-market experience by delaying graduation and labor-market entry. This is the first paper to quantify this trade-off, using an exit exam cutoff of Dutch academic secondary schools, where...

Facing substantial financial pressure, many districts close schools in order to preserve solvency and improve student outcomes. Using a new longitudinal data set on all non-Cook County Illinois schools, we examine the determinants of high school closure decisions from 1991 through 2005. Our...

We study the treatment effect of grade retention, using a panel of French junior highschool students, taking unobserved heterogeneity and the endogeneity of grade repetitions into account. We specify a multi-stage model of human-capital accumulation with a finite number of types representing...