Every economy has three major sectors: manufacturing, trading and services. The contribution of service sector has become increasingly important for countries' economic wellbeing. The education sector has received greater local and foreign direct investment. This research examines the...

Recent evidence suggests a positive effect of the quantity of instruction on student achievement. In this paper, I focus on the interaction between the quantity and the quality of instruction. Using international TIMSS data, I exploit within-student between-subject variation. I find that on...

Many preschool-age children in the U.S. attend center-based child care programs that are of low quality. This paper examines the extent to which teacher qualifications – widely considered important inputs to classroom quality - are valued by providers during the hiring process. To do so, we...

Pietro Sancassani prepared this study while he was working at the Center for Economics of Education at the ifo Institut. The study was completed in March 2023 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the LMU Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical essays and...

The paper investigates the effect of teacher characteristics (experience, level of education attainment and credentials, gender) on the achievement of eighth grade students using matched student-teacher data from the 1999, 2003 and 2007 TIMSS surveys. The analysis covers European countries, thus...

Early retirement incentives (ERIs) are increasingly prevalent in education as districts seek to close budget gaps by replacing expensive experienced teachers with lower-cost newer teachers. Combined with the aging of the teacher workforce, these ERIs are likely to change the composition of...