We partner communication technology with school information systems to automate the gathering and provision of high-frequency information on students’ academic progress to parents. We use this technology to send weekly automated alerts to parents about their child’s missed assignments, grades, and class absences. The intervention reduces course failures by 38%, increases class attendance by 17%...

Despite a large number of observational studies consistently reporting the association between shorter sleep duration and higher body weight, causality has yet to be established at a population level. This study aims to estimate the population-level causal effect of sleep duration on adolescent body weight, using an instrumental variable (IV) approach that exploits a unique natural experiment i...

We exploit the 1983 language-in-education reform that introduced Catalan alongside Spanish as medium of instruction in Catalan schools to estimate the labour market value of bilingual education. Identification is achieved in a difference-in-differences framework exploiting variation in exposure to the reform across years of schooling and years of birth. We find positive wage returns to bilingua...

Children's School Placement in Germany: Does Kindergarten Attendance Matter? The positive effects of early childhood programs on children's school success have been demonstrated in the literature. However, most studies were completed in the U.S.A., where early childhood programs vary widely, based on differing auspice, regulation, cost, and other factors. In European countries, early childhood ...

International research suggests that differences in teacher performance can explain a large portion of student achievement. Yet little is known about how the quality of the Australian teaching profession has changed over time. Using consistent data on the academic aptitude of new teachers, we compare those who have entered the teaching profession in Australia over the past two decades. We find ...

New Technology in Schools: Is There a Payoff? Despite its high relevance to current policy debates, estimating the causal effect of Information Communication Technology (ICT) investment on educational standards remains fraught with difficulties. In this paper, we exploit a change in the rules governing ICT funding across different school districts of England to devise an instrumental variable s...

Intergenerational Educational Persistence among Daughters: Evidence from India We examine educational transmission between fathers (mothers) and daughters in India for daughters born during 1962-1991. We find that educational persistence, as measured by the regression coefficient of father’s (mother’s) education as a predictor of daughter’s education, has declined over time. However, the correl...

Like Father, Like Son? Intergenerational Education Mobility in India An important constraint in studying intergenerational education mobility for India is the lack of data that contain information about parents’ education for the entire adult population. This paper employs a novel strategy to create a unique father-son matched data that is representative of the entire adult male population in I...

Children's School Placement in Germany: Does Kindergarten Attendance Matter? The positive effects of early childhood programs on children's school success have been demonstrated in the literature. However, most studies were completed in the U.S.A., where early childhood programs vary widely, based on differing auspice, regulation, cost, and other factors. In European countries, early childhood ...

Many public school choice programs use centralized mechanisms to match students with schools in absence of market-clearing prices. Among them, the Boston mechanism is one of the most widely used. It is well-known that truth-telling may not be optimal under the Boston mechanism, which raises the concern that the mechanism may create a disadvantage to parents who do not strategize or do not strat...