Despite progress over the past decades, Greece?s educational indicators lag behind those of other OECD countries. PISA scores are low, a large number of tertiary students study abroad, and attainment rates are low at all levels of education. Resources devoted to education are also modest....

Education as a way of increasing human capital is considered to be a basic factor of the growth process of the aggregate economy. The returns to investment into human capital are thus an important issue to analyze. In his PH.D thesis Mr Roope Uusitalo studies the effects of education on earnings...

This article introduces the 'Symposium on Primary and Secondary Education.' It points out that considerable controversy surrounds the issues treated by the articles in the symposium: the effect of the level of resources invested in education on student outcomes, and the educational financing...

The Czech Republic exhibits high geographical variation of both human capital and universities. We examine a potential source of human capital spatial disparities: the unequal access to tertiary education caused by the absence/presence of a local university. We model both a secondary school...

This study uses administrative data linking students and teachers at the classroom level to estimate teacher value-added to student test scores. We find that variation in teacher quality is an important contributor to student achievement more important than has been implied by previous work....

Value-added measures of teacher quality may be sensitive to the quantitative properties of the testing instruments upon which they are based. This paper focuses on the sensitivity of value-added to a particularly relevant testing-instrument property test-score-ceiling effects. Test-score...

There are fierce debates over the best way to prepare teachers. Some argue that easing entry into teaching is necessary to attract strong candidates, while others argue that investing in high quality teacher preparation is the most promising approach. Most agree, however, that we lack a strong...

Recent research shows that variation in teacher quality has large effects on student performance. However, this research is based entirely on student test scores. This paper evaluates teacher quality in terms of another educational outcome of great interest graduation. Using a unique...

This paper analyzes peer effects among university scientists. Specifically, it investigates whether the number of peers and their average quality affects the productivity of researchers in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. The usual endogeneity problems related to estimating peer effects are...

In line with the EU's goal of becoming a knowledge-based society, education and lifelong learning will also feature prominently on the agenda of the European Year. EU should use the current economic crisis to develop strategic goals both at European and national level and improve conditions for...