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...

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 ...

We examine the impact of tuition fees for long term students at the University of Konstanz. Applying duration analysis to examine how tuition fees influence when and how students finish their studies in six different majors, we find significant effects with respect to the hazard rates of the various ways of terminating one’s studies. Furthermore, we analyze how the probability of terminating on...

In 2012, Brazilian public universities were mandated to use affirmative action policies for candidates from racial and income minorities. We show that the policy makes students’ status a strategic choice may reject high-achieving minority students while admitting low-achieving majority students. Empirical data shows evidence consistent with this type of unfairness in more than 49 percent progra...

Leveraging the Tennessee STAR class size experiment, we show that Black students randomly assigned to at least one teacher in grades K–3 are 9 percentage points (13 percent) more likely graduate from high school and 6 (19 enroll college compared their schoolmates who not. teachers have no significant long-run effects on White students. Postsecondary education results driven by two-year colleges...

School choice systems aspire to delink residential location and school assignments by allowing children apply schools outside of their neighborhood. However, programs also affect incentives live in certain neighborhoods, this feedback may undermine the goals choice. We investigate possibility developing a model public narrows range between highest lowest quality compared neighborhood assignment...

During the Great Recession, national public school per-pupil spending fell by roughly 7 percent and persisted beyond recovery. The impact of such large sustained education funding cuts is not well understood. To examine this, first, we document that recessionary drop in coincided with end decades-long growth both test scores college-going. Next, show this stalled educational progress was partic...

I evaluate a reform in India which sought to provide a second teacher to all one-teacher primary schools. The central government paid for 140,000 teachers, which is 8% of the pre-reform stock of primary-level teachers. I find that less than half of these teachers were sent to the intended place. Additionally, teachers per school did not increase and class size did not decrease. The only effect ...

At the age of ten German pupils are given a secondary school track recommendation which largely determines the actual track choice. Track choice has major effects on the life course, mainly through labor market outcomes. Using data from the German PISA extension study, we analyze the effect of month of birth and thus relative age on such recommendations. We find that younger pupils are less oft...