In the transition to a market economy, the Russian workforce underwent a wrenching period of change, with excess supply of some industrial skills coexisting with reports of skills shortages by many enterprises. This paper uses data from the Russia Competitiveness and Investment Climate Survey...

Although there is a general agreement in the literature of the importance of social-emotional skills for labor market success, there is little consensus on the specific skills that should be acquired or how and when to teach them. The psychology, economics, policy research, and program...

Since the development of human capital theory, countless estimates of the economic benefits of investing in education for the individual have been published. While it is a universal fact that in all countries of the world the more education one has the higher his or her earnings, it is...

This paper assembles a panel data set that measures cognitive achievement for 128 countries around the world from 1965 to 2010 in 5-year intervals. The data set is constructed from international achievement tests, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment and the Trends in...

Early studies of educational achievement in developing countries emphasized the effects of material inputs (such as textbooks) over teaching practices and classroom organization. This paper examines how five teaching practices affected the achievements of fifth grade students in the Philippines...

Using data from Indonesia, Newhouse and Beegle to evaluate the impact of school type on academic achievement of junior secondary school students (grades 7-9). Students that graduate from public junior secondary schools, controlling for a variety of other characteristics, score 0.15 to 0.3...

As evidence from rigorous impact evaluations grows in development, there have been more calls to complement impact evaluation analysis with cost analysis, so that policy makers can make investment decisions based on costs as well as impacts. This paper discusses important considerations for...

Reaching agreement on a reasonable performance target is a challenge, with costs associated with getting it wrong. Attention in the literature has focused on the potential negative effects of gaming or of creaming. However, even if there is no gaming or creaming taking place, there can still be...

Empirical studies of the relationship between school inputs and test scores typically do not account for the fact that households will respond to changes in school inputs. This paper presents a dynamic household optimization model relating test scores to school and household inputs, and tests...

Professional skills are scarce in Mozambique, even by the standards of low-income countries. The solution, however, is not necessarily to create more Mozambican training institutions but to address market-specific problems. Where skills are already the binding constraint (for example, in...