Category Archives: Economics of Education

Three new economics papers offer interesting findings on important facets of education policy. Increasing Time to Baccalaureate Degree in the United States by John Bound, Michael Lovenheim, Sarah Turner Time to completion of the baccalaureate degree has increased markedly in … Continue reading →

Some Romanian evidence on the vexed question of how home computers impact children’s learning. Home Computer Use and the Development of Human Capital (gated stable link, ungated unstable link) Ofer Malamud and Cristian Pop-Eleches This paper uses a regression discontinuity … Continue reading →

Most of the time, low-cost interventions have barely any impact. So it’s refreshing occasionally to read about small things that make big differences, particularly when the results come from a rigorous randomised trial. From the Dee-Jacob economics of education factory… … Continue reading →

On the eve of public reporting of NAPLAN tests throughout Australia, Ben Jensen (ex-OECD, now running the education program at the Grattan Institute) has a new report on the topic. His key argument is for value-added scores (which will be … Continue reading →

I’ve often wondered whether teachers more or less likely to send their children to private schools, and in surfing through back issues of the Australian Education Researcher, I found at least a partial answer. A 2008 paper by Helen Proctor, … Continue reading →

A couple of new articles on teacher training: Charter school founders create a new ‘Teacher U’ The ongoing influence of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed in conventional university teacher education curricula A great piece from The Atlantic on Teach … Continue reading →

For the most part, economics analyses of merit pay programs (with either individual or group incentives) have tended to find positive effects. So it’s interesting to see a new study by Pedro Martins using data from Portugal that observes the … Continue reading →

My AFR oped today (competing with the ascendancy of a certain ex-monk), is on the impact of US school reforms on student achievement. Full text over the fold.

Some new education-related links: David Brooks on the willingness of the Obama-Duncan team to push radical school reform Elena Silva on re-organising teachers’ work to make schools more effective (use of teams, integrating on-the-job training, removing needless admin tasks). Andrew … Continue reading →

(xposted @ Core) One of the most rigorous studies of teacher merit pay has just reported its two-year results. The findings look pretty convincing, and the researchers don’t seem to have found much support for the kinds of perverse impacts … Continue reading →

A psychology study hit the headlines last Friday under the banner ‘Teacher quality makes little difference, study shows’.

One of our ANU RSSS visitors, Jacob Vigdor, has an opinion piece in today’s Australian about the (negative) impact of home computer use on test scores. He writes: Why should we believe, though, that the true effects are negative? The … Continue reading →

My second Wryside Economics talk on ABC Radio National Life Matters today was on two big issues in the economics of education – conditional cash transfers and class size reductions. If you’re interested, you can download it here.

My AFR oped today is on class size and teacher quality. Full text over the fold (with hyperlinks for anyone who wants more detail on the research).

The OECD’s new TALIS teacher survey looks to have some interesting findings. Press release over the fold. (HT: Nicholas Gruen)

I’m slow in posting about this, but my colleague Alison Booth is doing some very interesting research on single-sex schooling. From a recent writeup in the Age: Going to a single-sex school makes teenage girls more competitive than if they … Continue reading →