The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion of the effects of published school rankings based on average scores obtained by students on national exams. We study the effectiveness of this (low-stakes) accountability mechanism; we analyze whether students react to these rankings,...

We analyze the effects of several class compositional dimensions on individual student achievement. We make use of a rich dataset that allows tackling major endogeneity concerns stemming from non-random allocation of students between and within schools. We find that increasing the percentage of...

Being the youngest in a cohort entails many penalties. Using administrativedata of every public-school student in Portugal, we show that although performancegains from being 1-year older fade quickly from primary education to high school,age-related penalties persist through a combination of...

This study addresses some modeling questions related to the possibility of structural change in models with non-stationary variables. Focusing on cointegration issues, some methodological aspects ere discussed, attempting to integrate coherently the several steps of the modelling strategy. These...

This paper focuses on the territorial distribution of students with an immigrant background enrolled in the 3rd cycle of basic education in Portugal and on the differences in the academic performance of students enrolled in the last year of this cycle based on their birthplace and immigrant...

The objective of this paper is to assess the differences between contagion and investors' risk aversion in terms of their impact on European sovereign bond yields during the financial crisis. This paper evaluates contagion at banking level, as it has the advantage of capturing the exposure of...

Pharmaceutical spending in many other countries has had a steep increase in the last decade. The Portuguese Government has adopted several measures to reduce pharmaceutical expenditure growth, ranging from increased co-payments to price decreases determined administratively. Promotion of generic...