Student achievement has been identified as an important contributor to economic growth. This paper investigates the hypothesis that redistributive government activities have a negative effect on investment in human capital using data from international comparative student achievement tests in...

This paper estimates the causal effect of the wage on the recruitment rate at the establishment level. During the 1990s, the wage setting for certified teachers in Norway was completely centralized, with a wage premium of about 10 percent at schools with severe recruitment problems in the past...

Empirical analyses for the US suggest that stronger people's control over the school budget is deleterious to student performance. Using Swiss data on ninth graders in mathematics, reading and natural science collected jointly with the PISA study 2000, this paper tests this hypothesis for...