Previous research has found that immigration benefits the health of working-age natives, an effect mediated through the labor market. We use the Study of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to investigate whether immigration also affects the health of natives 65-80 years old....

Using Italian data on standardized test scores, we show that the substantial heterogeneity in how performance changes with the position of questions can alter the rank of individuals and classes as the length of the test increases. We examine whether decomposing test scores into initial...

Using Italian data on standardized test scores, we show that the performance decline associated with question position is heterogeneous across students. This fact implies that the rank of individuals and classes depends on the length of the test. Longer tests may also exhibit larger gaps between...

Motivated by anecdotal as well as econometric evidence from Italy, we ask whether private schools can provide lower quality than public schools. Using a stylized model of the education market with sequential entry of a public and a private school, we show that, depending on the underlying...

Secondary schools in the developed world differ in the degree of differentiation and in the first age of selection of pupils into different tracks. In this paper, we account for the heterogeneity of tracking time with a simple stochastic model which conjugates the returns from specialization...

During the postwar period, many countries have de-tracked their secondary schools, based on the view that early tracking was unfair. What are the efficiency costs, if any, of de-tracking schools? To answer this question, we develop a two skills - two jobs model with a frictional labour market,...

We study whether a higher share of immigrant pupils affects the school performance of natives using aggregate multi-country data from PISA. We find evidence of a negative and statistically significant relationship. The size of the estimated effect is small: doubling the share of immigrant pupils...

We model individual careers in sports and games from initial entry to eventual exit or success as a discrete-choice, finite-horizon optimization problem. We apply this model to the international game of chess and study cross-country differences in the relative success of players. While we find...

Using data for 22 economies in Eastern and Western Europe, we find evidence that having studied under communism is relatively penalized in the economies of the late 2000s. This evidence, however, is limited to males and to primary and secondary education, and holds for eight CEE economies but...