Based on Baumol’s cost-disease model, we develop two alternativemeasures of the change in the productivity of schooling. Bothproductivity measures are based on changes in the relative price ofschooling. We find that in most OECD countries the price of schoolinghas increased faster in 1970-94...

Decentralization of decision-making is among the most intriguing recent school reforms, in part because countries went in opposite directions over the past decade and because prior evidence is inconclusive. We suggest that autonomy may be conducive to student achievement in well-developed...

Available data and recently developed estimation methods make it possible to assess school performance in terms of a production process, where ’inputs’ of students, teachers, and resources are combined to create a very important ’output’: the cognitive skills of students. This paper...

While womens employment opportunities, relative wages, and the childquantityquality trade-off have been studied as factors underlyinghistorical fertility limitation, the role of womens education hasreceived little attention. We combine Prussian county data from threecensusesu1816, 1849, and...

Larger rates of exclusion, non-response, and age-specific enrollment are related to better country average scores on international student achievement tests. But accounting for sample selectivity does not alter existing evidence that academic achievement enters importantly in economic growth...

The trade-off between child quantity and quality is a crucial ingredient of unified growth models that explain the transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern growth. We present first evidence that such a trade-off indeed existed already in the nineteenth century, exploiting a unique...

East Asian students regularly take top positions in international league tables of educational performance. Using internationally comparable student-level data, I estimate how family background and schooling policies affect student performance in five high-performing East Asian economies. Family...

Within the framework of principal-agent-models, central exit exams canbe modelled as measures of accountability which hold students andschools responsible for their educational achievements. Comprehensiveregression analyses on the basis of individual student data provided byfour international...

Nineteenth-century Catholic doctrine strongly opposed state schooling. We show that countries with larger shares of Catholics in 1900 (but without a Catholic state religion) tend to have larger shares of privately operated schools even today. We use this historical pattern as a natural...