We study the effect of standardized external tests on students’ academic outcomes. We exploit the fact that only one of the 17 Spanish regions started doing and publishing the results of standardized tests in 2005 and apply a difference-in-difference methodology using outcomes of the PISA...

International large-scale assessments such as PISA are increasingly being used to benchmark the academic performance of young people across the world. Yet many of the technicalities underpinning these datasets are misunderstood by applied researchers, who sometimes fail to take their complex...