This paper analyzes theoretically the effects on the quality of the labor force of the introduction of the program called ProUni (Programa Universidade para Todos), adopted by the Brazilian government in 2005. This program consists of giving tax exemptions to private universities that provide scholarships to students coming from low income families. The analysis suggests that the quality of the...

School inspections are an important part of the accountability framework for education in England. In this paper we use a panel of schools to evaluate the effect of a school failing its inspection. We collect a decade’s worth of data on how schools are judged across a very large range of subcriteria, alongside an overall judgement of effectiveness. We use this data within a fuzzy regression dis...

International research suggests that differences in teacher performance can explain a large portion of student achievement. Yet little is known about how the quality of the Australian teaching profession has changed over time. Using consistent data on the academic aptitude of new teachers, we compare those who have entered the teaching profession in Australia over the past two decades. We find ...

Performance targets are ubiquitous in all areas of an individual’s life, such as education, jobs, sport competitions and charity donations. In this paper I study the effect of meeting performance targets in school tests on the probability that students subsequently engage in risky behaviour. This is helpful to assess whether behavioural channels such as motivation and effort by students, parent...

American students study harder in college than in high school while East Asian students study harder in high school than in college. This paper proposes a signaling explanation for this puzzle and provides its empirical evidence. The theory has three components. First, signaling may occur over time both in high school and college. Second, societies may di¤er when the signaling takes place, and ...

While leveraging parents has the potential to increase student performance, programs that do so are often costly to implement or they target younger children. We partner text-messaging technology with school information systems to automate the gathering and provision of information to parents at scale. In a field experiment across 22 middle and high schools, we used this technology to send auto...

Most studies fail to find an impact of school inputs on outcomes such as test scores. We argue that this might be a consequence of ignoring the possibility that households respond optimally to changes in school inputs and thus obscure the real e ect of such provision on cognitive achievement. To incorporate the forward-looking behavior of households, we present a household optimization model re...

Nearly all school-age children in the United States attend kindergarten, and approximately three-quarters of kindergarten students are in full-day classrooms. While there have been dramatic increases in provision of and participation in full-day kindergarten, there is little evidence on the impact and cost-effectiveness of such programs and policies, particularly as compared to other types of i...

We examine the e ect of shocks to teacher inputs on child performance in school. We start with a household optimization framework where parents spend optimally in response to teacher and other school inputs. This helps to isolate the impact of teachers from other inputs. As a proxy measure for these shocks, we use teacher absenteeism during a 30 day period. Shocks to teacher inputs have a signi...

Education System Reform in Pakistan: Why, When, and How? Pakistan’s education system faces long-standing problems in access, quality, and equal opportunity at every level: primary and secondary schools, higher education and vocational education. In spite of recent encouraging trends, such as the rapid spread of private schooling and an expansion of higher education opportunities, systemic refor...