We study how a large household windfall affects sorting of relatively disadvantaged youth over high school tracks by exploiting the discontinuity in the assignment of a welfare program in Mexico. The in-cash transfer is found to significantly increase the probability of selecting vocational...

We estimate preferences for school tracks in upper secondary education in Hungary. We consider travel time, school SES composition, school level (in terms of peer quality) and school quality (in terms of added value). We find that students have stronger preferences for school SES composition and...

We examine the effect of attending academically selective high schools on test scores, by leveraging administrative data that matches high school preferences of the population of urban middle school graduates in one Chinese prefecture in 2010 with high school student records. The standard...

We use administrative data from Ireland to study differences in college application behavior between students from disadvantaged versus advantaged high schools. Ireland provides an interesting laboratory for this analysis as applicants provide a preference-ordering of college programs (majors)...

Without a school degree, students can have difficulty in the labor market. To improve the lives of upper-secondary school dropouts, German states instituted a school reform that awarded an interim degree to high-track students upon completion of Grade 9. Using retrospective spell data on school...

Grades are one of the most important factors in the transition between different levels of education. However, conditional on cognitive skills, grades differ substantially between girls and boys. This gender disparity in grade assignments according to cognitive skills may create asymmetrical...

To investigate the effects of reducing the intensity of tracking, this study exploits reforms across German states which combined the two lower secondary school tracks, sometimes additionally offering the possibility to acquire a university entrance qualification. Using a...

This study aims to identify the main determinants of student performance in reading and maths across eight European Union countries (Austria, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Slovakia, and Slovenia). Based on student-level data from the OECD’s PISA 2018 survey and by means of the...