Using that schools are in session during the school year and out of session during the summer, it is possible to isolate the effect of schooling on learning. This natural experiment situation can also be used to see whether schooling compensates for disadvantageous social backgrounds. Using a...

This paper presents economic models of child development that capture the essence of recent findings from the empirical literature on skill formation. The goal of this essay is to provide a theoretical framework for interpreting the evidence from a vast empirical literature, for guiding the next...

Using a representative sample of Ecuadorian young women’s households, this paper focuses on the role played by education in shaping fertility choices and labor market participation. Education, which is found to be endogenous with respect to teenage childbearing, is instrumented by a reform...

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,...

We investigate the effect of education Conditional Cash Transfer programs (CCTs) on teenage pregnancy. Our main concern is with how the size and sign of the effect may depend on the design of the program. Using a simple model we show that an education CCT that conditions renewal on school...

The paper examines whether meeting performance targets in tests at school has an effect on students' subsequent achievement in education and the take-up by schools of financial support from the government for students. We build a theoretical model to describe the channels through which students'...