The Effect of Immigration on the School Performance of Natives: Cross Country Evidence Using PISA Test Scores We study whether a higher share of immigrant pupils affects the school performance of natives using aggregate multi-country data from PISA. We find evidence of a negative and statistically significant relationship. The size of the estimated effect is small: doubling the share of immigra...

We investigate the persistence of short-term effects of a high-quality school-based prekindergarten program in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We analyze third-grade reading and math scores for two cohorts of students eligible to participate in pre-kindergarten in 2000-01 and 2005-06, using boosted regression and propensity score matching to select a comparison group of local students who did not participate ...

The Effects of Vocational Training Programmes on the Duration of Unemployment in Eastern Germany This paper focuses on the effects of vocational training programmes on the duration of unemployment in Eastern Germany. We use information from administrative data of the Federal Employment Office. To allow for observable and possible unobservable influences we apply a multivariate mixed proportiona...

We set up an OLG-model, where households both choose human capital investment and decide on investing their endogenous savings in a portfolio of riskless and risky assets, exposing them to (aggregate) wage and capital risks due to technological shocks. We derive the optimal public policy mix of taxation and education policy. We show that risks can be efficiently diversified between private and ...

This paper evaluates the effects of two subsidy schemes targeted at disadvantaged students in the Netherlands. The first scheme gives schools with at least 70 percent minority students extra funding for personnel. The second scheme gives schools with at least 70 percent students from different disadvantaged groups extra funding for computers and for language materials. The cutoffs at 70 percent...

Empirical evidence suggests that the size of the informal sector in the developing countries has increased considerably during the liberalized economic regime. The present paper purports to analyze the consequences of economic reforms on the wellbeing of the informal sector workforce using a three-sector general equilibrium model with two informal sectors. The theoretical analysis finds that di...

This paper develops ideal estimators to causally estimate the effect of two education reforms in India that expanded the access to schooling. These policies differed in their levels of decentralization in decision making. The different administrative levels decided which inputs the funds were allocated for and where the school-building was targeted. Comparing the two policies, I find evidence t...

Access to Public Schools and the Education of Migrant Children in China A significant proportion of migrant children in China are not able to attend public schools for lack of local household registration (HuKou), and turn to privately-operated migrant schools. This paper examines the consequences of such a partially involuntary school choice, using survey data and standardized test scores from...

This Time It’s Different? Youth Labour Markets During ‘The Great Recession’ This paper looks at the effects of the ‘Great Recession’ on young people’s labour market experiences in the European Union. The paper documents some of the key characteristics of young people’s labour market experiences during the current recession and then seeks to provide some explanations of these applying both cross...

This paper incorporates two-stage education in a political economy model to study the endogenous determination of public budget allocation across education stages. With hierarchical education, individuals’ benefits from higher education depend on their qualifications, and congestion arises when higher enrollment lowers schooling quality. In less developed economies, the top class has dominant p...