This paper studies the extent to which young children develop their cognitive ability in high and low quality schools. We use a representative panel data set containing cognitive test scores of 4-6 year olds in Dutch schools. School quality is measured by the school's average achievement test...

Several recent studies find that interventions in schools can have important lasting consequences for students, and that schools differ in their contribution to students' learning. However, there is less research investigating how these differences between schools influence longer-term outcomes,...

This paper studies school quality in the context of Norwegian compulsory schooling. I demonstrate that even when lagged achievement is not observed, it is possible to construct informative value-added (VA) indicators of persistent school quality by adjusting exam scores for students' background...

Mentoring has become an extremely popular policy for improving the retention and performance of new teachers, but we know little about its effects on teacher and student outcomes. I study the impact of mentoring in New York City, which adopted a nationally recognized mentoring program in 2004. I...

Does relaxing strict school discipline improve student achievement, or lead to classroom disorder? We study a 2012 reform in New York City public middle schools that eliminated suspensions for non-violent, disorderly behavior. Math scores of students in more-affected schools rose by 0.05...

This paper provides new evidence of the short and long-run effects of vocational training (VT) on labor market and educational outcomes, with a particular interest in how school quality may confound estimates. VT schools may differ from regular schools not only in terms of type of training, but...

The quality dimension of immigrant human capital has received little attention in the economic assimilation literature. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate how human capital acquired in different source countries may be adjusted according to its quality in the Canadian labor market....

Instrumental variables estimators typically must satisfy monotonicity conditions to be interpretable as capturing local average treatment effects. Building on previous research that suggests monotonicity is unlikely to hold in the context of school entrance age effects, we develop an approach...

This study examines whether hurricanes have any impact on performance in standardized examinations. The analysis uses a panel of thirteen Caribbean countries and over 800 schools for the period 1993 through 2010. In particular, the effect on subjects in the humanities and sciences are examined....

Many nations allow private entities to manage publicly funded schools and grant them greater flexibility than traditional public schools. However, isolating the causal effect of attending these privately managed public schools relative to attending traditional public schools is difficult because...