Good teachers are critical for a high-quality educational system. This in turns leads to the question of who is interested in going into the teaching profession. Although research has been done on the professional careers of teachers, the issue of self-selection into teacher education has been...

Although instruction time is an important and costly resource in education production, there is a remarkable scarcity of research examining the effectiveness of its use. We build on the work of Lavy (2015) using the variance of subject-specific instruction time within Switzerland to determine...

Although instruction time is an important and costly resource in education production, there is a remarkable scarcity of research examining the effectiveness of its use. We build on the work of Lavy (2015) using the variance of subject-specific instruction time within Switzerland to determine...

In this paper we analyse the sibling size and birth-order effect on educational achievement in Switzerland on the basis of PISA data. We find an overall modest size and birth-order effect. The sibling size effect, however, is a product of a substantial and significant negative size effect for...

Wage expectations are important determinants for individual schooling decisions. However, research on individual expectations of students is scarce. The paper presents the Swiss results of a survey that was conducted in 10 European countries. Its main findings are that point estimates of wages...

Switzerland changed its migration policy in the 1990s from a "non-qualified only" policy to one of almost free movement of labor. To analyze the impact of this policy change on the schooling outcomes of children of first-generation migrants, the paper compares the PISA results of...