The collapse of marginally Jeans unstable primordial gas clouds in the presence of UV radiation field is discussed. Assuming that the dynamical collapse proceeds approximately in an isothermal self-similar fashion, we investigate the thermal evolution of collapsing central core until H2 cooling dominates photoheating and the temperature drops to below 10K. Consequently, the mass of the cooled c...

Increasing access to education may have consequences that go beyond the effects on marginal students induced to enroll. It may change school quality, peer effects, and returns to skill. This paper studies the effects of an educational expansion on student learning, exploiting an Italian reform that changed the admission requirements for university STEM majors. Newly collected administrative dat...

Using PIRLS 2001 and PISA 2003 data for Germany, this paper examines whether secondgeneration immigrants and girls are graded worse in math than comparable natives and boys, respectively. Once all grading-relevant characteristics, namely math skills and oral participation, are accounted for, pupils should obtain same school grades. Results of a matching approach and class fixed effects regressi...

How Equal Are Educational Opportunities? Family Background and Student Achievement in Europe and the United States This paper estimates the effects of family-background characteristics on student performance in the US and 17 Western European school systems. Family background has strong effects both in Europe and the United States, remarkably similar in size. France and Flemish Belgium achieve t...

This paper studies the effects of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the school environment on educational achievement. To quantify these effects, the impact is evaluated of a project run by the municipality of Guayaquil, Ecuador, which provides computer-aided instruction in mathematics and language to students in primary schools. Using an experimental design, it is found that ...

This paper provides evidence of the effect of age at school entry on college admission and earnings. It does so by exploiting a number of features in the application process to one of the major flagship universities in Brazil. By comparing applicants with different ages at school entry depending on whether they were born on December 31 or on January 1, our estimates show that applicants who del...

We develop and implement a framework for determining the optimal performance metrics to help parents choose a school. This approach combines the three major critiques of the usefulness of performance tables into a natural metric. We implement this for 500,000 students in England for a range of performance measures. Using performance tables is strongly better than choosing at random: a child who...

We estimate the effect of age of school entry on educational outcomes using two different data sets for Germany, sampling pupils at the end of primary school and in the middle of secondary school. Results are obtained based on instrumental variable estimation exploiting the exogenous variation in month of birth. We find robust and significant positive effects on educational outcomes for pupils ...

Much attention has recently focused on the rapidly rising costs of a college education, and whether the benefits of attending an elite private college have kept pace with the increasing costs. In this paper we analyze whether undergraduate college quality affects the likelihood that an individual attends graduate school. Using data on three cohorts of students from the National Longitudinal Stu...

Close Neighbours Matter: Neighbourhood Effects on Early Performance at School Children’s outcomes are strongly correlated with those of their neighbours. The extent to which this is causal is the subject of an extensive literature. An identification problem exists because people with similar characteristics are observed to live in close proximity. Another major difficulty is that neighbourhoods...