From 2010 onwards, most US states have aligned their education standards by adopting the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for math and English Language Arts. The CCSS did not target other subjects such as science and social studies. We estimate spillovers of the CCSS on student achievement in...

School curricula have lasting impacts on students. In theory, reforming school curricula can be a powerful tool for policy-makers, but may also be harmful. To empirically prove the latter, we analyse the adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for math and English in the US. We...

The teaching of evolution theory in school has a lasting impact on students. Reforms of the coverage of evolution in US education standards have a positive effect on students’ knowledge of evolution by the end of high school. These reforms translate into a greater belief in evolution in...

Anti-scientific attitudes can impose substantial costs on societies. Can schools be an important agent in mitigating the propagation of such attitudes? This paper investigates the effect of the content of science education on anti-scientific attitudes, knowledge, and choices. The analysis...

Benjamin W. Arold prepared this study while he was working at the Center for Economics of Education at the ifo Institute. The study was completed in March 2022 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the LMU Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical essays that...

Additional private schooling within a nation-state may increase citizens' political and economic freedom through increased educational quality, balanced power relationships, and increased civic engagement.We employ a two-stage-least-squares time and country-level fixed-effects analytical...

Though researchers now are aware of the potential importance of character skills, such as conscientiousness, grit, self-control, and a growth mindset, researchers struggle to find reliable measures of these skills. In this paper, we use data collected from the Understanding America Study, a...

School voucher programs (a.k.a. opportunity scholarships) are scholarship programs - frequently government funded - that pay for students to attend private schools of their choice. Many private school vouchers programs have been initiated around the world with the goal of increasing the academic...

"This volume of essays examines the empirical evidence on school choice in different countries across Europe, North America, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. It demonstrates the advantages which choice offers in different institutional contexts, whether it be Free Schools in the UK, voucher...