This study evaluates techniques to identify high-quality teachers. Since tenure restricts dismissals of experienced teachers, schools must predict productivity and dismiss those expected to perform ineffectively prior to tenure receipt. Many states rely on evaluation scores to guide these personnel decisions without considering other dimensions of…

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant disruption in education. We employ a gravity model to estimate its impact on international student credit mobility. Data on inbound and outbound students to and from four Spanish universities between the academic years 2017-2018 and 2021-2022 are used. While COVID-19 significantly reduced participation…

State and federal governments invest millions of dollars in providing accurate and relevant information on expected outcomes to students pursuing higher education, but whether such information targets what students value about college is unclear. We use new survey data to identify the extent to which conventional indicators for college quality and…

Many studies suggest a relationship between education and political participation, but only some address causality. We add to this by re-examining the German case. For identification, we exploit an exogenous increase in compulsory schooling, and use data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). The data enable analyses that do not rely…

Students in the UK apply to university with teacher-predicted examination grades, rather than actual results. These predictions have been shown to be inaccurate, and to favour certain groups, leading to concerns about teacher bias. We ask whether it is possible to improve on the accuracy of teachers' predictions by predicting pupil achievement…

We develop two formal competitive models of the private higher education market focusing on quality and tuition where informational asymmetry is present: one consisting of for-profit universities only, and the other including also private non-profit universities. For both models, we characterize the competitive equilibrium to gain insights into…

The present study presents a formal model of the dynamics of a university's reputation that points to the existence of a snowball effect where alumni donations raise a university's reputation, which in turn generates additional alumni donations. Given that econometric results presented in this study confirm the model's main findings, supporting a…

In this study, we test how the level of relative teacher wages affects educational outcomes. Russia provides a unique setting for testing this relationship given its high regional heterogeneity. We use two measures of educational outcomes at different levels of the school system. Our results show that the level of relative teacher wages has a…

Education is key to development strategies in Africa. We use overeducation and undereducation to analyse the effectiveness of education in preparing individuals for employment in Kenya and Ghana, using the Skills Towards Employment and Productivity Survey. Systematic differences in wages between matched, overeducated and undereducated workers hold…

We present a theory explaining the impact of ability tracking on academic performance based on grading policies. Our model distinguishes between initial ability, which is mainly determined by parental background, and eagerness to learn. We show that achievements of low ability students may be higher in a comprehensive school system, even if there…

We evaluate two reforms that modified the procedures of recruitment and promotion in Italian academia to balance the preeminent role of the recruiting school and to counter nepotism. We theoretically derive the decision rule of the evaluation committees and test it against data including information from all selections to associate and full…

In a recent contribution, Redding and Schott [2003. "Distance, Skill Deepening and Development: Will Peripheral Countries Ever Get Rich?" "Journal of Development Economics": 72 (2): 515-541. doi:10.1016/S0304-3878(03)00118-4] add human capital to a two sector NEG model, highlighting that remoteness represents a penalty that…

School dropout is a growing concern across Latin America because of its negative social and economic consequences. Identifying who is likely to drop out, and therefore could be targeted for interventions, is a well-studied prediction problem in countries with strong administrative data. In this paper, we use new data in Guatemala and Honduras to…

Using school level data we examine which factors influence charter school location decisions. We augment previous research by employing a panel dataset, recently developed geographic techniques to measure distances and define areas, and employing a hurdle model to deal with the excess zero problem. The main results of our research indicate that,…

Existing empirical work looking at the effects of parental income on IQ, schooling, wealth, race, and personality is only able to explain about half of the observed intergenerational income elasticity. This paper provides a possible behavioral explanation for this elasticity in which heterogeneous agents in sequential generations choose their…