This paper provides first micro-level evidence of the global university production frontier, allowing to estimate technical efficiencies of 273 top research universities across 29 countries between 2007 and 2009. Exploiting comparable international data improves the estimation of the production...

This paper examines the causal link between education and democracy. Motivated by a model whereby educated individuals are in a better position to assess the effects of public policies and hence favor democracy where their opinions matter, the empirical analysis uses World Values Surveys to...

The thought that the academy might function like a ‘market place for ideas’ has been influential in the economics of science and is increasingly so in the philosophy of science/economic methodology literature. This paper contributes to this literature by examining one respect in which the...

Student achievement has been identified as an important contributor to economic growth. This paper investigates the hypothesis that redistributive government activities have a negative effect on investment in human capital using data from international comparative student achievement tests in...

Decentralization of decision-making is among the most intriguing recent school reforms, in part because countries went in opposite directions over the past decade and because prior evidence is inconclusive. We suggest that autonomy may be conducive to student achievement in well-developed...

Empirical growth regressions typically include mean years of schooling as a proxy for human capital. However, empirical research often finds that the sign and significance of schooling depends on the sample of observations or the specification of the model. We use a nonparametric local-linear...

The paper provides a comparative analysis of the association between student achievement and public-private partnerships (PPPs) in schooling across countries. Student-level data from the PISA international achievement test provides information on the public-private character of both operation...

There is no empirical evidence that trade exposure per se increases child labour. As trade theory and household economics lead us to expect, the cross-country evidence seems to indicate that trade reduces or, at worst, has no significant effect on child labour. Consistently with the theory, a...

There is a wealth of existing literature on specific methods to encourage public participation in Local Agenda 21. This paper provides a concise overview and comparative assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches. For the sake of clarity, these methods are categorised into...

Der Festvortrag von Thomas Rachel, die Statements von Roland Berger, Peter Müller und Ludger Wößmann sowie die ifo Konjunkturprognose sind hier veröffentlicht.