By OECD standards, the share of the Australian labour force with at least a secondary school qualification is low. One way to rectify this shortfall is to improve rates of re-engagement in education among early school leavers. This paper examines the patterns of re-engagement among early school...

This paper investigates whether gender-matching school environments can improve girls' interest and motivation in science. Using the PISA data from South Korea, the empirical results of this paper show that gender-matching school environments have the most positive effect on the attitudinal...

This paper studies the effects of enrollment in an elite school on students' achievement. We use that elite schools in Amsterdam are often oversubscribed and admission is based on lotteries. Our results show that elite schools have negative effects on achievement of students who just qualify for...

The weak quality of education received by most poor children in South Africa places them in permanent disadvantage relative to those attending the mainly more affluent and better performing schools. This document draws from a large number of studies undertaken for a major project and summarises...

A lack of longitudinal data prevents many countries from estimating dynamic models and, thus, from obtaining valuable evidence for policy making in the field of education. This is the case of Spain, where recent education reforms have targeted secondary schools, but their design has been based...

Whether early school stratification is conducive or detrimental to scholastic performance has been subject to controversial debates in educational policy and science across many countries. We exploit a unique exogenous variation in Lower Saxony, Germany, where performance based tracking was...

Privatization in education is often associated to higher academic performance but greater social inequality on it, whereas standardization of school systems is associated to equalization of opportunities, at the cost of lower performance. Until now, however, we have not had evidence about that...

While South Africa has made significant improvements in basic and tertiary education enrollment, the country still suffers from significant challenges in the quality of educational achievement by almost any international metric. The paper finds that money is clearly not the main issue since the...

This paper provides evidence of a novel facet of peer effects by showing how peer personality affects educational achievement. We exploit random assignment of students to university sections and find that students perform better in the presence of more persistent peers and more risk-averse...

Despite the prevalence of school tracking, evidence on whether it improves student success is mixed. This paper studies how tracking within high school impacts high-achieving students' short- and longer-term academic outcomes. Our setting is a large and selective Chinese high school, where...