Ludger Woessmann

Class-Size Effects in School Systems Around the World: Evidence from Between-Grade Variation in TIMSS

To be able to accept high-voltage pulses, in the order of 70 kV, required for re-starting a hot high-power high-pressure discharge lamp, having a power rating, for example, of 6 kW and up, including 12 kW, a ceramic base is provided with auxiliary mica strips or plates (13) positioned between part of the terminal posts or pins, and especially in the region of retentions flanges or rims formed thereon, and extending up to about the end portion (4a) of a pinch or press seal, into which connection leads extend, connected to the pins or posts. The additional mica strips or plates (13), for example located on both sides of a central separating strip (10), retained in suitable grooves or slots (14) formed in the base effectively prevent arc-over, creep currents and corona discharge between the terminal pins or posts (8a, 8b), the circumferentially projecting flanges or rims (16a, 16b) and the connected current supply leads (7a, 7b). Typically, the pins or posts are closer together than the current leads (7a, 7b) at their point of entry into the pinch or press-sealed end (4a) of the lamp bulb (4).

*‘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 today. We use this historical pattern as a natural experiment to estimate the causal effect of contemporary private competition on student achievement in cross-country student-level analyses. Our results show that larger shares of privately operated schools lead to better student achievement in mathematics, science, and reading and to lower total education spending, even after controlling for current Catholic shares.

The Empire is Dead, Long Live the Empire! Long-Run Persistence of Trust and Corruption in the Bureaucracy

Do empires affect attitudes towards the state long after their demise? We hypothesize that the Habsburg Empire with its localized and well-respected administration increased citizens’ trust in local public services. In several Eastern European countries, communities on both sides of the long-gone Habsburg border have been sharing common formal institutions for a century now. Identifying from individuals living within a restricted band around the former border, we find that historical Habsburg affiliation increases current trust and reduces corruption in courts and police. Falsification tests of spuriously moved borders, geographic and pre-existing differences, and interpersonal trust corroborate a genuine Habsburg effect.

Does School Autonomy Make Sense Everywhere? Panel Estimates from PISA

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 systems but detrimental in low-performing systems. We construct a panel dataset from the four waves of international PISA tests spanning 2000-2009, comprising over one million students in 42 countries. Relying on panel estimation with country fixed effects, we estimate the effect of school autonomy from within-country changes in the average share of schools with autonomy over key elements of school operations. Our results suggest that autonomy affects student achievement negatively in developing and low-performing countries, but positively in developed and high-performing countries. These estimates are unaffected by a wide variety of robustness and specification tests, providing confidence in the need for nuanced application of reform ideas.

Luther and the girls: Religious denomination and the female education gap in nineteenth-century Prussia

Martin Luther urged each town to have a girls’ school so that girls would learn to read the Gospel, thereby evoking a surge of building girls’ schools in Protestant areas. Using county- and town-level data from the first Prussian census of 1816, we show that a larger share of Protestants decreased the gender gap in basic education. This result holds when using only the exogenous variation in Protestantism due to a county’s or town’s distance to Wittenberg, the birthplace of the Reformation. Similar results are found for the gender gap in literacy among the adult population in 1871.

Econometric Methods for Causal Evaluation of Education Policies and Practices: A Non-Technical Guide

Education policy‐makers and practitioners want to know which policies and practices can best achieve their goals. But research that can inform evidence‐based policy often requires complex methods to distinguish causation from accidental association. Avoiding econometric jargon and technical detail, this paper explains the main idea and intuition of leading empirical strategies devised to identify causal impacts and illustrates their use with real‐world examples. It covers six evaluation methods: controlled experiments, lotteries of oversubscribed programs, instrumental variables, regression discontinuities, differences‐in‐differences approach, and panel data techniques. Illustrating applications include evaluations of early childhood interventions, voucher lotteries, funding programs for disadvantaged students, and compulsory school and tracking reforms.

Knowledge capital, growth, and the East Asian miracle.

Access to schools achieves only so much if quality is poor With per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) growing by an average of 4.5% annually since 1960, people in East Asia are about nine times as prosperous as two generations ago. By contrast, the average person in Latin America is only about two and a half times as prosperous. Over the past quarter-century, both theoretical and empirical analyses of possible drivers of the different growth rates seen around the world invariably assign an important role to human capital (1–4). This has led to development policies focused on increasing enrollment and retention in schools. We argue, however, that too much attention is paid to the time spent in school, and too little is paid to the quality of the schools and the types of skills developed there.

The Economic Case for Education.

The case for education can be made from many perspectives. This paper makes the case for education based on economic outcomes. Surveying the most recent empirical evidence, it shows the crucial role of education for individual and societal prosperity. Education is a leading determinant of economic growth, employment, and earnings in modern knowledge-based economies. Ignoring the economic dimension of education would endanger the prosperity of future generations, with widespread repercussions for poverty, social exclusion, and sustainability of social security systems. Policy-makers interested in advancing future prosperity should particularly focus on educational outcomes, rather than inputs or attainment.

The Role of International Assessments of Cognitive Skills in the Analysis of Growth and Development

While most analyses of growth and development emphasize the central role of human capital, measurement issues have plagued both research and policy development. Specifically, attention to school attainment and enrollment rates appears misdirected. In contrast, recent work has shown that the measures of cognitive skills that can be derived from international assessments greatly improve the ability to explain differences in economic growth rates across countries. Moreover, improved cognitive skills appear to have dramatic impacts on the future economic well-being of a country, suggesting that policy actions should focus directly on school quality and other means of improving cognitive skills.

Virtually No Effect? Different Uses of Classroom Computers and their Effect on Student Achievement

Most studies find little to no effect of classroom computers on student achievement. We suggest that this null effect may combine positive effects of computer uses without equivalently effective alternative traditional teaching practices and negative effects of uses that substitute more effective teaching practices. Our correlated random effects models exploit within-student between-subject variation in different computer uses in the international TIMSS test. We find positive effects of using computers to look up information and negative effects of using computers to practice skills, resulting in overall null effects. Effects are smaller for low-SES students and mostly confined to developed countries.