“Every Catholic Child in a Catholic School”: Historical Resistance to State Schooling, Contemporary Private Competition, and Student Achievement across Countries 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...

In this paper we consider whether certain countries are particularly adept (or particularly poor) at getting children from disadvantaged homes to study for a bachelor’s degree. A series of university access models are estimated for four English speaking countries (England, Canada, Australia and the United States) which include controls for comparable measures of academic achievement at age 15. ...

Do Peers Affect Student Achievement? Evidence from Canada Using Group Size Variation We provide the first empirical application of a new approach proposed by Lee (2007) to estimate peer effects in a linear-in-means model. This approach allows to control for grouplevel unobservables and to solve the reflection problem. We investigate peer effects in student achievement in Mathematics, Science, F...

This paper argues that the evolution of male preferences contributed to the dramatic increase in the proportion of working and educated women in the population over time. Male preferences evolved because some men experienced a different family model—one in which their mother was skilled and/or worked. These men, we hypothesize, were more inclined to marry women who themselves were skilled or wo...

This paper evaluates the eff ectiveness of the introduction of a Writing Center at a university. The center has the purpose to provide subject-specifi c courses that aim to improve students‘ abilities of scientifi c writing. In order to deal with presumed selfperceptional biases of students in feedback surveys, we use diff erent quantitative evaluation methods and compare the results to corresp...

Gender Differences in Education This paper surveys the trends in gender gaps in education, their causes and potential policy implications. I show that female educational attainment has surpassed, or is about to surpass, male educational attainment in most industrialized countries. These gaps reflect male overrepresentation among secondary school drop-outs and female overrepresentation among ter...

When one analyses the influence of social identity on scholastic effort, ethnic identity largely contributes to determine it. In this paper, ethnic identity is meant as the attachment to one’s cultural heritage and the adaptation to host societies; this allows considering how conflicting demands and social pressure from parents, peers, ethnic community and host societies influence children’s ef...

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) are two highly respected studies of school pupils’ academic achievement. English policymakers have been disappointed with school children’s performance on these tests, particularly in comparison to the strong results of young people from East Asia. In this paper we provide new insight i...

This paper examines the effect of lifelong learning on men’s employment and wages. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, a variant of the mover-stayer model is developed in which hourly wages are either taken from a stationary distribution (movers) or are closely related to the hourly wage one year earlier (stayers). Mover-stayer status is not observed and we therefore model wages...

Drawing on a very rich data set from a recent cohort of PhD graduates, we examine the correlates and consequences of qualification and skills mismatch. We show that job characteristics such as the economic sector and the main activity at work play a fundamental direct role in explaining the probability of being well matched. However, the effect of academic attributes seems to be mainly indirect...