This study estimates teacher value-added (TVA) for language arts and mathematics test scores of students in public primary schools to investigate the empirical relationship between testscore TVA and observable traits and promotions of teachers. Our empirical strategy employs Chetty, Friedman,...

Using data from TIMSS 2015, an international large-scale assessment of student skills, I investigate the effect of teacher characteristics on students' science achievement. My identification strategy exploits the feature that in many education systems different science domains (physics, biology,...

This paper argues that school grades cannot be interpreted solely as a reward for a given school performance, since they also reflect teachers’ ratings of pupils. Grades therefore contain valuable information about pupils’ own – usually unknown – ability. The incorporated assessment in...

This study was prepared by Martin Schlotter while he was working with the Ifo Institute for Economic Research. It was completed in June 2011 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Econcomics at the University of Munich in November 2011. It addresses the effects of different early...

The value-added to student achievement model has become a key tool for estimating the effects of individual teachers and their classrooms on students' short-term academic success, and more importantly, on later-life outcomes. We use primary school data from the German National Educational Panel...