Using data from TIMSS 2015, an international large-scale assessment of student skills, I investigate the effect of teacher characteristics on students' science achievement. My identification strategy exploits the feature that in many education systems different science domains (physics, biology,...

Pietro Sancassani prepared this study while he was working at the Center for Economics of Education at the ifo Institut. The study was completed in March 2023 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the LMU Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical essays and...

Does the salience of a topic affect polarization in related parliamentary debates? When discussing a salient topic, politicians might adopt more extreme stances to gain electoral consensus. Alternatively, they could converge towards more moderate positions to find a compromise. Using...

Human capital theory recognizes that time preferences - patience - are important for skill investments. We show how Facebook interests can be used to construct subnational measures of patience. Differences in patience are closely related to regional student achievement in Italy and the United...

Die Testleistungen von Schüler*innen in den naturwissenschaftlichen Einzelfächern sind um 3,5 % besser als der Durchschnitt, wenn ihre Lehrkraft eine Qualifikation im betreffenden Fach hat. Dies zeigt eine Analyse der internationalen Schülerleistungsdaten TIMSS 2015 in den Fächern Biologie,...

What makes a good teacher? This is one of the central questions in the economics of education. General teacher qualifications, such as education level or advanced degrees, tend to be poor predictors of teacher quality. Instead, some studies have shown that subject-specific qualifications predict...

Pietro Sancassani prepared this study while he was working at the Center for Economics of Education at the ifo Institut. The study was completed in March 2023 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the LMU Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical essays and...

Does the salience of a topic affect polarization in related parliamentary debates? When discussing a salient topic, politicians might adopt more extreme stances to gain electoral consensus. Alternatively, they could converge towards more moderate positions to find a compromise. Using...

Decisions to invest in human capital depend on people's time preferences. We show that differences in patience are closely related to substantial subnational differences in educational achievement, leading to new perspectives on longstanding within-country disparities. We use social-media data...