Nineteenth-Century Catholic doctrine strongly opposed state schooling. We show that countries with larger shares of Catholics in 1900 (but without a Catholic state religion) tend to have larger shares of privately operated schools even today. We use this historical pattern as a natural...

Despite its high relevance to current policy debates, estimating the causal effect of Information Communication Technology (ICT) investment on educational standards remains fraught with difficulties. In this paper, we exploit a change in the rules governing ICT funding across different school...

Choice and competition in education have found growing support from both policy makers and academics in the recent past. Yet, evidence on the actual benefits of market-oriented reforms is at best mixed. Moreover, while the economic rationale for choice and competition is clear, in existing work...

During the postwar period German states pursued policies to increase the share of young Germans obtaining a university entrance diploma (Abitur) by building more academic track schools, but the timing of educational expansion differed between states. This creates exogenous variation in the...

Immigrants typically perform worse than other students in the OECD countries. We examine to what extent this is due to the population characteristics of the neighborhoods that immigrants grow up in. We address this issue using a governmental refugee placement policy which provides exogenous...

The trade-off between child quantity and education is a crucial ingredient of unified growth models that explain the transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern growth. We present first evidence that such a trade-off indeed existed before the demographic transition, exploiting a unique...

The trade-off between child quantity and education is a crucial ingredient of unified growth models that explain the transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern growth. We present first evidence that such a trade-off indeed existed before the demographic transition, exploiting a unique...

The paper argues that access to public infrastructure plays a crucial role on the presence of private schools in a community, as it could not only minimise the cost of production, but also ensure a high return to private investment. Results using community, school and child/household-level PROBE...

The paper looks at secondary school attendance and grade retention after 8th grade in Hungary. It makes use of panel data of the Hungarian Life Course Survey from 2006 through 2009. Three and a half years after finishing 8th grade, ninety per cent of the children are in school, three quarters on...

This paper investigates the relationship between educational attainment and truancy. Using data from the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales, we estimate the causal impact that truancy has on educational attainment at age 16. Problematic is that both truancy and attainment are measured as...