This paper studies a large-scale educational expansion to evaluate whether shocks to school inputs have an impact on the academic achievement of adult education students. I analyze the spillover effects of a Swedish policy that temporarily doubled enrollment in adult education, thus putting...

In 2002 the career of Colombian public school teachers was significantly reformed through the introduction of a selective entry competition and of further quality incentives. This paper estimates how the new quality-screened teachers impact students' high school performance. We exploit the fact...

K-12 education policy has recently received much scrutiny from policymakers, taxpayers, parents, and students. Reformers have often cited increases in spending with little noticeable gain in test scores, coupled with the fact that American students lag behind their foreign peers on standardized...

Low salaries, a limited amount of full-time teaching positions, and alternative systems of allocating teaching hours lead teachers to look for additional jobs in other schools. Although this is a more common phenomenon of teacher labor markets in developing countries, teachers who teach specific...

In 2006, the Florida Supreme Court ended the state funded voucher program which allowed students of repeatedly failing public schools to transfer to a private school. This gives us the unique opportunity to evaluate the incentive character of a private school competition threat in school...

This report presents and describes an evaluation project of the most recent Swedish curriculum reform, Curriculum for the compulsory school, preschool class and the recreation centre, Lgr 11. The purpose of the evaluation project is to generate new knowledge concerning the influences of...

The existence of a rigid cutoff date which determines when children start primary school creates a large heterogeneity in students' level of maturity within the classroom. We use rich administrative data of the universe of public schools in Catalonia to show that: (1) relatively younger children...

Child care and education are important inputs in the human capital production function. The research of Nobel prize winner James Heckman shows that skills are built from the early childhood on and increase the returns of later educational inputs, in short: skill begets skill. Therefore, it is...

In the past 15 years, four-year-olds' enrollment in state-funded pre-kindergarten in the United States has doubled, and advocates have pushed for further expansion. Although research has shown that pre-K programs can have important benefits, most existing studies have focused on small or...

Over the 2000s, many federal states in Germany shortened the duration of secondary school by one year while keeping the curriculum unchanged. Exploiting quasi-experimental variation due to the staggered introduction of this reform allows me to identify the causal effect of increased learning...