The purpose of our study is to compare the impact of an extra year of schooling on PISA achievement across several national education systems and explore why that impact may differ across systems. We first attempt to measure and compare the impact of an extra year of schooling on PISA...

Does online social media undermine authoritarianism? We examine the conditions under which online social networks can increase public awareness of electoral fraud in non-democracies. We argue that a given online social network will only increase political awareness if it is first politicized by...

We explore how modern autocrats win elections by inducing employers to mobilize their employees to vote for the regime and thereby subvert the electoral process. Using two original surveys of employers and workers conducted around the 2011 parliamentary elections in Russia, we find that just...

Stateness is the capacity of the state to exercise its fundamental functions. The collapse of the socialist system prompted the former USSR countries to „re-invent? their stateness. The paper focuses on factors that impede or smooth stateness transformations in post-socialist countries. First,...

Exposure to prenatal androgens affects both future behavior and life choices. However, there is still relatively limited evidence on its effects on academic performance. Moreover, the predicted effect of exposure to prenatal testosterone (T) - which is inversely correlated with the relative...

It is commonplace that a sovereign state is a prerequisite to democracy. But not all states are alike, each having different resources, capacities, priorities, properties, and so forth. What kinds of states and what particular features are conducive to democracy or autocracy? How do different...

This article analyzes student pro-school/anti-school attitudes on different levels and explores their relation to educational outcomes. We examine the individual level, school level, and clique level predictors (clique is defined as a tight social group within a class social network). Cliques...

This research focuses on estimating the signalling role of education on the Russian labour market. Two well-known screening hypotheses are initially considered. According to rst of these, education is an ideal lter of persons with low productivity: education does not increase the productivity of...

We estimate the influence of classmates’ ability characteristics on student achievement in exogenously formed student groups. The study uses administrative data on undergraduate students at a large selective university in Russia. The presence of high-ability classmates has a positive effect on...

This paper focuses on the changing economic value of secondary and higher education in four potential world economic powerhouses—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—known as the BRIC countries. We show that in the past twenty-five years in the BRIC countries, changes in rates of return to...