In many countries, college-bound high school seniors must pass a test or series of tests. In Israel, this requirement is known as the “Bagrut”, or matriculation certificate, obtained by passing a series of subject tests. In spite of the Bagrut’s value, Israeli society is marked by vast...

Until 1983, the language of instruction for most subjects in grades six and above in Moroccan public schools was French. Beginning in 1983, the language of instruction for new cohorts of Moroccan sixth graders was switched to Arabic. The authors use this policy change to estimate the effect of...

Child health is widely perceived to affect strongly schooling. But evidence is quite limited because numerous studies based on socioeconomic surveys fail to consider the endogeneity of child health, measurement error, and the impact of unobserved fixed and choice inputs. This paper shows that a...

This article uses the mass migration wave to Israel in the 1990s to examine the impact of immigrant concentration during elementary school on the long-term academic outcomes of native students in high school. The results suggest that the overall presence of immigrants in a grade had an adverse...

A longstanding question in the economics of the family is the relationship between sibship size and subsequent human capital formation and economic welfare. If there is a causal "quantity-quality trade-off," then policies that discourage large families should lead to increased human capital,...

Food aid averages only ten percent of total financial aid to developing countries, but in certain African countries - Botswana, Cape Verde, Mauritius, and Mauritania - it represents more than half the food available for consumption. The author applies vector auto-regression (VAR) analysis to...

Better health and nutrition are thought to improve children's performance in school, and therefore their productivity after school. Most literature ignores the fact that child health and schooling reflect behavioral choices, so the estimated impact of health and nutrition on a child's schooling...