Teaching is often assumed to be a relatively stressful occupation and occupational stress among teachers has been linked to poor mental health, attrition from the profession, and decreased effectiveness in the classroom. Despite widespread concern about teachers' mental health, however, little...

Teachers are increasingly being drawn from the lower parts of the general ability distribution, but it is not clear how this affects student achievement. We track the position of entering teachers in population-wide cognitive and non-cognitive ability distributions using school grades and draft...

In this paper, we use data from the German PISA 2003 sample to study the effects of central exit examinations on student performance, student attitudes, and teacher behavior. Unlike earlier studies we use (i) a value-added measure to pin down the effect of central exit exams on learning in the...

This study examines how the teaching staff composition with respect to certification affects student achievement in compulsory Swedish schools. The share of non-certified teachers in compulsory schooling has increased dramatically during the last decade, starting a large debate about school...

The federal government's Race to the Top competition has promoted the adoption of test-based performance measures as a component of teacher evaluations throughout many states, but the validity of these measures has been controversial among researchers and widely contested by teachers' unions. A...