How does early educational quality affect longer-term academic outcomes? We shed light on this question via a natural experiment in the Philippines--the implementation of a mother tongue education policy in public schools in kindergarten to Grade 3. This policy led to an unexpected decline in...

We investigate the short-term impact of out-of-home care on child health, schooling and juvenile crime. Using an event study to examine the dynamics around the time of placement, we document a clear deterioration of mental health and increasing crime rates before placement. After placement, we...

Pietro Sancassani prepared this study while he was working at the Center for Economics of Education at the ifo Institut. The study was completed in March 2023 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the LMU Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical essays and...

The charter school movement encompasses many school models. In Massachusetts in the 2010's, the site of our study, urban charter schools primarily used "No Excuses" practices, whereas nonurban charters had greater model variety. Using randomized admissions lotteries, we estimate the impact of...

We examine whether and how teachers' major fields of study affect students' achievement, exploiting within-student variation across subfields in natural science (i.e., physics, chemistry, biology, and Earth science). Using middle-school students' data from the Trends in International Mathematics...

We exploit the 1990-2000 inflow of Yugoslav refugees to Geneva to examine two understudied yet policy-relevant integration mechanisms for refugee pupils: language support classes, provided prior to integration into regular classes, and sorting based on academic ability within regular classes. We...

We partner with Ecuador's government to implement a centralized school choice system using a Deferred Acceptance algorithm in Manta. Our study evaluates the welfare impact of transitioning from a distance-based assignment system to one that incorporates families' preferences. Results show that...

This paper analyzes how changes in school expenditures affect dropout rates and standardized test scores based on data from 465 school districts in New York during the 2003/04 to the 2008/09 school years. Past traditional regression approaches show inconsistent results of school expenditures...

For over twenty years, a voucher system has been used in Chile to promote competition in the educational system between public and private schools. Attending a private subsidized school is associated with increased standardized test scores, but the apparent impact is relatively small....