Wealth and gender inequity in the accumulation of cognitive skills is measured as the association between subject competency and wealth and gender using the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment. Wealth inequity is found to occur not through disparate household characteristics...

This paper examines the long-term impacts of improved school quality at the elementary school stage on subsequent schooling investments and labor market outcomes using unique data from a recent survey that tracked students in the Philippines. The empirical results, which are based on a...

In the past two years alone, at least six systematic reviews or meta-analyses have examined the interventions that improve learning outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. However, these reviews have sometimes reached starkly different conclusions: reviews, in turn, recommend information...

In determining whether a country's higher education system should be expanded, it is important for policymakers first to determine the extent to which high private returns to post-secondary education are an indication of the scarcity of graduates instead of the high unobserved ability of...

Private schooling is an important feature of the educational landscape in Pakistan and is increasingly a topic of public and government discourse. This study uses multiple rounds of national household sample surveys to examine the extent and nature of private school participation at the primary...

This paper uses student answers to publicly released questions from an international testing agency together with statistical methods from Item Response Theory to place secondary students from two Indian states -Orissa and Rajasthan -on a worldwide distribution of mathematics achievement. These...

Fe y Alegria is a catholic network of schools that started operations in Colombia in 1971, and in 2009 served more than 72,000 students in 61 schools. This paper assesses the performance of Fe y Alegria secondary schools in Colombia using test scores for Spanish and mathematics, as well as...

This paper studies the relative academic performance of students tracked or randomly assigned to South African university dormitories. Tracked or streamed assignment creates dormitories where all students obtained similar scores on high school graduation examinations. Random assignment creates...

Rates of return to investments in schooling have been estimated since the late 1950s. In the 60-plus year history of such estimates, there have been several attempts to synthesize the empirical results to ascertain patterns. This paper presents comparable estimates, as well as a database, that...

This paper summarizes the socioeconomic conditions of children around the world. It explores solutions to the main problems, along with a summary of the costs and benefits of some of the solutions. Emphasis is on the results from rigorous studies, impact evaluations, and randomized experiments....