The paper presents a model of educational production which tries to make sense of recent evidence on effects of institutional arrangements on student performance. In a simple principal-agent framework, students choose their learning effort to maximize their net benefits, while the government...

An emerging economic literature over the past decade has made use of international tests of educational achievement to analyze the determinants and impacts of cognitive skills. The cross-country comparative approach provides a number of unique advantages over national studies: It can exploit...

At the same time that researching on social inclusion and collectives in social exclusion risk is going forward, the role played by families becomes more and more important for its social inclusion and future life. The collective of people with disabilities claims the correct working of their...

In this paper I survey the recent economics of education literature in order to identify which education policies can effectively improve the quality of primary schooling, as measured by pupil test-based achievements. Particular attention is devoted to the experience of England, a country which...

Reconciling work and family is high on many governments' agenda, especially in countries, such as Spain, with record-low fertility and female labor force participation rates. This paper analyzes the effects of a large-scale provision of publicly subsidized child care in Spain in the early 1990s,...

Bildung ist eine der zentralen föderalen Aufgaben in Deutschland. So können die Bundesländer die Bildungspolitik weitgehend alleine gestalten, müssen allerdings auch die Ausgaben dafür tragen. Die Bildungsausgaben stellen einen der größten Posten den Länderhaushalten dar. Ökonomisch...

We investigate whether the academic performance of non-eligible students - in an institutional setting of full inclusion - are affected by special education resources. Special education resources are per definition provided in a compensatory manner, and are increasingly being targeted to...

Differences in teacher quality are commonly cited as a key determinant of the huge international student performance gaps. However, convincing evidence on this relationship is still lacking, in part because it is unclear how to measure teacher quality consistently across countries. We use unique...

Student performance differs greatly across countries, but little is known about the role of teacher quality in explaining these differences. New international data from the PIAAC survey of adult skills allow for the first time to quantify teacher skills in numeracy and literacy, providing...