This paper investigates how legal cannabis access affects student performance. Identification comes from an exceptional policy introduced in the city of Maastricht which discriminated legal access based on individuals' nationality. We apply a difference-in-difference approach using...

Differences in teacher quality are commonly cited as a key determinant of the huge international student performance gaps. However, convincing evidence on this relationship is still lacking, in part because it is unclear how to measure teacher quality consistently across countries. We use unique...

This paper investigates how legal cannabis access affects student performance. Identification comes from an exceptional policy introduced in the city of Maastricht which discriminated legal access based on individuals’ nationality. We apply a difference-in-difference approach using...

Student performance in Sub-Saharan Africa is tragically low. We study the importance of teacher subject knowledge for student performance in this region using unique international assessment data for sixth-grade students and their teachers. To circumvent potential bias due to unobserved student...

This paper contributes to the economics of examination rules. We show how rational students reallocate their learning effort as a response to a charge for the second exam attempt, a cap on the maximum resit mark, an adjustment of the passing standard, a variation of the time span between two...

Economic theory that underlies many empirical microeconomic applications predicts that treatment responses depend on individuals' characteristics and location on the outcome distribution. Using data from a large-scale Pakistani school report card experiment, we consider tests for treatment...

Children growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods tend to perform significantly worse in school compared to children growing up under more favorable circumstances. We examine the impact of a three-year program ("Coaching for Teaching") targeted at ten poorly performing lower secondary schools...

Is it possible to compress instruction time into fewer school years without lowering education levels? A fundamental reform in Germany reduced the length of academic track schooling by one year, while increasing instruction hours in the remaining school years to provide students with a very...

Using country panel data of student achievement from PISA, 2003-2012 combined with national-level teacher salary data from the OECD; this study investigates if relatively short term -5-years - changes in the level and structure of statutory teacher salaries affect student performance in the...

Recently, policy makers worldwide have suggested and passed legislation to ban mobile phone use in schools. The influential and only quantitative evaluation by Beland and Murphy (2016), suggests that this is a very low-cost but effective policy to improve student performance. In particular, it...