We model schooling as a sequential process and examine why some children are left behind. We focus on the factors that explain selection at early stages of the education system. Our findings for Uruguay suggest that long-term factors, such as parental background or ethnicity matter across all...

During the past century, access to education increased in countries all over the world. Up until the early decades of the 20th century, people attended school for only a few years. Towards the end of the century, adults in high-income countries completed 12 years of schooling, on average. Today...

Inequality of opportunity strikes when two children with the same academic performance are sent to different quality schools because their parents differ in socio-economic status. Based on a novel dataset for Germany, we demonstrate that children are significantly less likely to enter the...

We evaluate the aggregate, distributional and welfare consequences of alternative government education policies to encourage college completion, such as making college free and improving funding for public schooling. To do so, we construct a general equilibrium overlapping generations model with...

Decisions about admission to selective schools usually rely on performance measures. To reach a required achievement threshold students may make use of additional resources, such as private tutoring. We investigate how the use of private tutoring relates to the transition probability to an...