In a previous paper, we have shown that academic rank is largely unrelated to tutorial teaching effectiveness. In this paper, we further explore the effectiveness of the lowest-ranked instructors: students. We confirm that students are almost as effective as senior instructors, and we produce...

We investigate the effects of "lecture-based" (LBT) – i.e. individual work and rote learning - versus "discussion-based" (DBT) - i.e. participative and focused on student-centred learning - teaching styles on the test scores and socio-economic inequality of middle-school students randomly...

Schools are ripe for policy intervention. We demonstrate that a greater prevalence of group discussion used in schools positively affects students' life satisfaction and noncognitive skills but has no impact on test scores, based on a sample from the 2015 PISA which includes more than 35...

Katharina Wedel prepared this study while she was working at the Center for the Economics of Education at the ifo Institute. The study was completed in September 2023 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at LMU Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical essays that...

Girls tend to outperform boys in reading tests, while they usually lag behind boys in math. However, the size of the gender gap varies to a great extent between countries. While the existing literature explains these differences as being mainly due to cultural factors, this paper explores...

Non-monetary incentives such as praise are common-place, but their effects on workers performing cognitively-complex tasks remain largely unknown. I expand the teacher incentive literature through a field experiment measuring how repeated public praise for the best teachers impacts teacher...

This paper estimates the number of teachers required to meet different pupil-teacher (P-T) ratio targets in 2030 for all education levels in Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA). It also assesses the affordability of those targets based on different scenarios and presents detailed projections for...

Student performance in Sub-Saharan Africa is tragically low. We study the importance of teacher subject knowledge for student performance in this region using unique international assessment data for sixth-grade students and their teachers. To circumvent potential bias due to unobserved student...

This paper estimates how peers' achievement gains are affected by the presence of potentially disruptive and emotionally sensitive children in the school-cohort. We exploit that some children move between schools and thus generate variation in peer composition in the receiving school-cohort. We...

Few would contest that teachers are a very important determinant of whether students learn in school and how to improve teacher performance has been the focus of much policy debate in rich and poor countries. This paper examines how incentives, both pecuniary and non-pecuniary, correlate with...