Relative performance feedback (RPF) has often been shown to improve effort and performance in the workplace and educational settings. Yet, many studies also document substantial negative effects of RPF, in particular for low-achievers. We study a novel type of RPF designed to overcome these...

An overall picture of the education system in the countryside reveals that there are still schools that are not connected to the drinking water and sewerage systems, where the toilet is in the school yard. There are still schools where children stay in classrooms dressed up with outdoor clothing...

Compulsory schooling increases average level of education in a country and provides other benefits, its effect on geographical distribution is, however, not obvious. We explore the effect of a sudden change in compulsory schooling in Turkey, that increased mandatory years of schooling from five...

In a world crisis generated by the spread of Covid-19, beyond the negative consequences, fast and efficient responses were needed from the authorities across the world, both for the scenario in which the crisis was on a short period and education would have recovered quickly, and especially for...

The Covid-19 pandemic has had a strong impact on education in Romania and worldwide. Radical measures have been necessary in the field of education, to limit the spread of the virus (like in all the fields affected by the pandemic). One of these measures - the closure of schools, universities...

Throughout the education system, more and more classrooms are using digital technology. Although the idea of a digital or smart classroom has been around for years, electronic technology such as tablets, laptops, smartphones, and e-readers enable learning anytime and anywhere. They support all...

Since 2007, the Ecuadorian government has required teacher candidates to pass national skill and content knowledge tests before they are allowed to participate in merit-based selection competitions for tenured positions at public schools in an attempt to raise teacher quality. We evaluate the...

Social mobility is a key element of meritocratic societies. We analyze multigenerational social mobility with a hand-collected yearly Swiss dataset from 1550 to 2019. With our surname-based approach, we measure the Swiss society's overall permeability over more than 450 years. Furthermore, we...

Creating distributional national accounts (DINA; e.g. Piketty, Saez, and Zucman 2018) requires the allocation of all government expenditure to individuals in order to compute their post-tax, post-transfer income. A sizeable part of government expenditure is in-kind spending, either in the form of...

We study a mentoring program that aims to improve the labor-market prospects of schoolattending adolescents from disadvantaged families by offering them a university-student mentor. Our RCT investigates program effectiveness on three outcome dimensions that are highly predictive of adolescents'...