Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores ("value-added") a good measure of their quality? This question has sparked debate partly because of a lack of evidence on whether high value-added (VA) teachers improve students' long-term outcomes. Using school district and tax records for more...

Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores ("value-added") a good measure of their quality? One reason this question has sparked debate is disagreement about whether value-added (VA) measures provide unbiased estimates of teachers' causal impacts on student achievement. We test for bias in...

High-stakes admission exams to selective schools create incentives for more intensive study effort possibly increasing study achievements of students. Exploiting the exogenous change of a schooling system and using two waves of TIMSS survey data we find that high-stakes exams increase math test...

This paper examines the link between poverty and income, on the one hand, and human capital and location, on the other. In the process, the paper proposes a shift in the household indicator of human capital from the usual education of the household head to the education of the most educated...

This paper adds to the literature on extracurricular early childhood education and child development by exploiting unique data on an educational project in Germany, the Junior University (JU). Utilizing a quasi-experimental study design, we estimate the causal short-term effect of JU enrollment...

This paper examines the demographic pattern of friendship links among youth and the impact of those patterns on own educational outcomes using the friendship network data in the Add Health. We develop and estimate a reduced form matching model to predict friendship link formation and identify...

We focus on high school dropout rate among male and female immigrant children. We consider the relationship between the dropout rate and age of arrival of the immigrants. Using repeated cross sectional data from the Israeli Labor Force Surveys of 1996-2011 we show that the share of high school...

This paper presents evidence on the impact of the largest deployment of an OLPC program: Plan Ceibal in Uruguay. Unlike previous work in the field, we have unique data that allow us to know the exact date of laptop delivery for every student in the sample. This gives us the ability to use a...

This paper provides evidence on peer effects in standardized tests by exploiting a unique data set on social networks in Uruguayan primary schools. The identification method enables one to disentangle endogenous from contextual effects via instrumental variables that emerge naturally from the...

We study the long-term causal effects of attending a "better" school - defined as one with more advanced peers, more highly paid teachers, and a more academic curriculum - on the highest degree completed, wages, occupational choice, and unemployment. We base our analysis on a regression...