Teachers are increasingly being drawn from the lower parts of the general ability distribution, but it is not clear how this affects student achievement. We track the position of entering teachers in population-wide cognitive and non-cognitive ability distributions using school grades and draft...

Teachers are increasingly being drawn from the lower parts of the general ability distribution, but it is not clear how this affects student achievement. We track the position of entering teachers in population-wide cognitive and non-cognitive ability distributions using school grades and draft...

We document a substantial decline in the position of entering teachers in population-wide cognitive and non-cognitive ability distributions, as well as the upper-secondary school grade (GPA) distribution. Next, we estimate the causal impact on student achievement using matched student-teacher...

Information about teachers' effectiveness at the hiring stage is particularly scarce despite its importance for personnel decisions. Using the German setting of teacher training, I investigate the relationship of teachers' pre-service cognitive and pedagogical skills as measured by two state...

Previous studies have often emphasized the gender effects of individual teachers but have paid less attention to the gender composition of teacher teams. We examine the effects of teacher gender composition on the noncognitive characteristics of students by use of randomly assigned...

Schools are ripe for policy intervention. We demonstrate that a greater prevalence of group discussion used in schools positively affects students' life satisfaction and noncognitive skills but has no impact on test scores, based on a sample from the 2015 PISA which includes more than 35...

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...