Reforms of primary education undertaken in Madhya Pradesh since the mid-1990’s have been said to be bringing the state close to universal enrolment, yet they have sparked much controversy and have hardly been the subject of any independent research. This paper presents the results of a field...

This paper examines the relationship between "school quality" and earnings in the United Kingdom. The specific focus is on evaluating the effect that private schooling has on hourly wage rates. It is well known that private (i.e. fee-paying) schools compared to state schools score higher on most...

Historically, most attention in public programs has been given to the resources devoted to the activity, and resources have been used to index both commitment and quality. Education differs from other areas of public expenditure because direct measures of outcomes are available, making it is...

This paper estimates the impact of elite school attendance on long- run outcomes including completed education, income and fertility. Our data consists of individuals born in the 1950s and educated in a UK dis- trict that assigned students to either elite or non-elite secondary schools. Using...

Free school choice has often been argued to be a tide that lifts school quality through increased competition. This paper analyzes the underlying assumption that school quality is an important choice criterion for parents. Using a large and representative data set of over 15,000 Dutch primary...

This paper estimates the impact of elite school attendance on long-run outcomes including completed education, income and fertility. Our data consists of individuals born in the 1950s and educated in a UK district that assigned students to either elite or non-elite secondary schools. Using...

This paper studies the extent to which young children develop their cognitive ability in high and low quality schools. We use a representative panel data set containing cognitive test scores of 4-6 year olds in Dutch schools. School quality is measured by the school's average achievement test...

We show that grading standards for primary school exams in England have triggered an inflation of quality indicators in the national performance tables for almost two decades. The cumulative effects have resulted in significant differences in the quality signaled to parents for otherwise...

This paper sets out a framework for estimating household preferences over a broad range of housing and neighborhood characteristics, some of which are determined by the way that households sort in the housing market. This framework brings together the treatment of heterogeneity and selection...

Many nations allow private entities to manage publicly funded schools and grant them greater flexibility than traditional public schools. However, isolating the causal effect of attending these privately managed public schools relative to attending traditional public schools is difficult because...