the achievement impact of alternative uses of student assessments. In result, the expansion of standardized external … comparisons associates with improvements in student achievement. The effect of schoolbased comparison is stronger in low … inspectorates do not affect student achievement. Chapter 4 investigates how teacher specialization to a field of subjects during …

sentiment (considering both confidence and uncertainty) and economic activity. Second, we review existing empirical measures of … sentiment, in particular consumer confidence, stock market volatility (SMV) and Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU), on monthly … across countries, suggesting the existence of a global factor. Consumer confidence has the closest co-movement with economic …