Nineteenth-Century Catholic doctrine strongly opposed state schooling. We show that countries with larger shares of Catholics in 1900 (but without a Catholic state religion) tend to have larger shares of privately operated schools even today. We use this historical pattern as a natural...

Martin Luther urged each town to have a girls' school so that girls would learn to read the Gospel, evoking a surge of building girls' schools in Protestant areas. Using county- and town-level data from the first Prussian census of 1816, we show that a larger share of Protestants decreased the...

Lifelong learning becomes increasingly important in times of population ageing, but little is known about the returns to adult education or the effectiveness of government attempts to promote adult learning. This paper evaluates the effects of a large-scale randomized field experiment with...

We provide a measure of equality of educational opportunity in 54 countries, estimated as the effect of family background on student performance in two international TIMSS tests. We then show how organizational features of the education system affect equality of educational opportunity. Our...

Wie gerecht oder ungerecht sind die Bildungschancen von Kindern mit verschiedenen familiären Hintergründen in Deutschland verteilt? Die vorliegende Studie vergleicht die Wahrscheinlichkeit eines Gymnasialbesuchs für Kinder mit niedrigerem Hintergrund (weder ein Elternteil mit Abitur noch...

The study estimates educational production functions for seven eastern European transition countries, using student-level data for lower secondary education. The analysis several distinctive features. First, the countries can be divided into two groups, which share similar characteristics in...

German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly...