Recent research exploits a variety of natural experiments that create exogenous variation in annual school days to estimate the average effect of formal schooling on students' academic achievement. However, the extant literature's focus on average effects masks potentially important variation in...

The combination of changing sleep patterns in adolescence and early school start times leaves secondary school classrooms filled with sleep-deprived students. Evidence is growing that having adolescents start school later in the morning improves grades and emotional well-being, and even reduces...

This paper proposes an approach to identifying the education production function with endogenous inputs, and applies it in the context of part-time employment decisions by UK teenagers in compulsory education. We identify simultaneously the effect of part-time employment and latent endogenous...

Student absences are a potentially important, yet understudied, input in the educational process. Using longitudinal data from a nationally-representative survey and rich administrative records from North Carolina, we investigate the relationship between student absences and academic...

Using administrative data on schools in England, we estimate an education production model of cognitive skills at the end of secondary school. We provide empirical evidence of selfproductivity of skills and of complementarity between secondary school inputs and skills at the end of primary...

The great majority of studies on the effect of school quality on academic outcomes do not take account of changes in student choices concerning effort if school quality, e.g. class size, changes. We show that empirical estimates of the "total" effect of changes in school quality could be quite...

Student attendance is both a critical input and intermediate output of the education production function. However, the malleable classroom-level determinants of student attendance are poorly understood. We estimate the causal effect of class size and observable teacher qualifications on student...

Credible evidence from a variety of contexts suggests that student absences harm academic achievement. However, extant studies focus entirely on the average effects of student absences, and how those average effects vary by student, school, and absence type. This paper enhances our understanding...

Educational systems can be characterized by a complex structure: students, classes and teachers, schools and principals, and providers of education. The added value of schools is likely influenced by all these levels and, especially, by interactions between them. We illustrate the ability of...