This paper argues that skill formation is a life-cycle process and develops the implications of this insight for Scottish social policy. Families are major producers of skills, and a successful policy needs to promote effective families and to supplement failing ones. We present evidence that...

We estimate the effect of age of school entry on educational attainment using three different data sets for Germany, sampling pupils at the end of primary school, in the middle of secondary school and several years after secondary school. Results are obtained based on instrumental variable...

The federal government's Race to the Top competition has promoted the adoption of test-based performance measures as a component of teacher evaluations throughout many states, but the validity of these measures has been controversial among researchers and widely contested by teachers' unions. A...

In this article, we try to analyze the performance of the investment in education through lighting the theory of human capital. The current debate on the measures and values education is a major challenge for economic analysis. This analysis is part of a framework where education is playing an...

Performance targets are ubiquitous in all areas of an individual's life such as education, jobs, sport competitions and charity donations. In this paper I assess whether meeting performance targets in tests at school has an effect on students' subsequent behaviour. This is helpful to test...

The many and varied links between student socio-economic status and educational outcomes have been well documented in the South African economics of education literature. The strong legacy of apartheid and the consequent correlation between education and wealth have meant that, generally...

We evaluate a program that aims to improve children's reading skills by providing classes with age-appropriate reading material and incentivizing children to read through a 31 day read-a-thon. During the read-a-thon, the program significantly increases the propensity of children to read, causing...

The study has been carried out to measure the incidence of government spending on education in Pakistan at the provincial (both rural and urban) level, using the primary data of the Pakistan Social Standard Living Measures Survey (PSLM), 2004-2005, and by employing the three-step Benefit...

In this study we investigate the causes of low secondary school enrollment in Indonesia despite near universal primary school attendance. We then find that attrition during the transition between primary and junior secondary education levels is the main cause. We investigate the causes of...

Immigration is an important problem in many societies, and it has wide-ranging eects on the educational systems of host countries. There is a now a large empirical literature, but very little theoretical work on this topic. We introduce a model of family immigration in a framework where school...