This paper investigates the impact of attending early childcare on second generation immigrant children's cognitive outcomes. Our analysis draws on administrative data on the entire population of students in fifth grade collected by the Italian Institute for the Evaluation of the Educational...

We examine the differences in an index of standardized test performance of urban private/public school seniors by race, using a sample of 4,172 students from the 1992 U.S. National Education Longitudinal Survey. In addition to using 257 exogenous variables to control for individual traits,...

This paper investigates the impact of instructional days on student performance. Because school year length is endogenously determined, I estimate the causal impact of school year length through two quasi-experiments that exploit different sources of variation in instructional days. The fi rst...

This study separately estimates the effects of kindergarten-entry age, age-at-test, and schooling on cognitive skills using a new identification strategy. These three variables are considered to be perfectly multicollinear in the period of compulsory schooling so that it is deemed that it is not...

This paper examines the effects of high school de-tracking on Korean SAT scores. After accounting for the sample selection bias using an event study approach with matching, we identify three distinct channels of de-tracking effects: classroom effects from peer quality and teaching effectiveness,...

Is expanding the scope for parents to choose among competing schools an effective policy lever for improving the quality of education? What lessons can we take from British Columbia’s experience with greater school choice? In 2002, British Columbia implemented a new policy that makes it easier...

This paper explores the idea that LDCs may face a human capital constraint in terms of having insufficient numbers of suitably educated people to be able to take advantage of technological innovations in the rich world. Technologically advanced sectors which operate under increasing returns to...

We estimate the contemporaneous effect of education on adolescent crime by exploiting the variation in crime rates between different cohorts and at different ages that followed a reform that raised the school-leaving age in Italy. A 1 percentage-point increase of the enrollment rate reduces...

This paper studies the impact of a lottery-based desegregation program that allows minority students to transfer to seven school districts serving higher-income, predominantly-white families. While prior research has studied the impacts of such a program receiving students, this paper studies...

Students face four decision margins: (a) How many years to spend in school, (b) What to study, (c) How much effort to devote to learning per year and (d) Whether to disrupt or assist the learning of classmates. The thousands of studies that have applied human capital theory to the first two...