This paper shows that austerity-induced spending cuts harmed student performancein standardized national tests. To identify this relationship, we use cross-municipalityvariation in the timing of eligibility for the Italian Domestic Stability Pact as an exogenous shifter of local public spending....

School accountability schemes require measures of school performance, and these measures are in practice often based on pupil test scores. It is well-known that insufficiently correcting these test scores for pupil characteristics may provide incentives for inefficient pupil selection. We show...

Insufficient resources and inadequate public expenditure management often prevent governments in low-income countries from providing quality basic education free of charge. User payments by parents are an alternative means of financing basic education. This paper assesses how user payments...

Globalisation, together with skill-biased technical change, is changing the composition of jobs in advanced economies and raising the level of skills required to do them. This has increased the importance of educating a large proportion of the population to much higher standards than in the...

The average educational attainment of US students is weak by international comparison. For example, mean results of PISA test scores are below the OECD average. This is despite substantial resources devoted to the schooling system. One partial explanation for this is that academic standards,...

Benchmarking is intended to help gauge where economies rank relative to others. However, historically educational benchmarking has often elected to use indicators based on their ease of availability, rather than a clear and defined link between inputs and learning outcomes. In this paper, we...

This paper presents a theoretical model and empirical estimations to evaluate the effects of competition on school quality. Empirical estimations, using roughly 5,000 Chilean schools in the 1994-1997 period and econometric techniques robust to endogeneity, support the theoretical model and show...

Labour engagement, underutilization and unemployment has dominated discourse in development literature in developing economies. It tangentially dictates the direction of migration, gross domestic output and in some cases, youth restiveness. This study investigated the unique relationship between...

The paper studies the impact of financial aid on long-term educational attainment and labor market outcomes in Colombia. In 2014, the government launched a large-scale and generous student loan program called "Ser Pilo Paga." It offered full tuition coverage to students admitted to one of 33...

Educaţia reprezentă un vector social determinant al dezvoltării omului, al evoluţiei lui spirituale, influenţând direct toate componentele câmpului social, în particular economia şi, în acest sens, orientarea resurselor, a celor financiare în special, spre susţinerea unei educaţii a...