Documents educational reform 55 results

"This paper investigates the effect of education on fertility under inflexible labor market conditions. We exploit exogenous variation from a German compulsory schooling reform to deal with the endogeneity of education. By using data from two complementary datasets, we examine different fertility outcomes over the life cycle. In contrast to evidence for other developed countries, we find that increased education causally reduces completed fertility. This negative effect operates through a postponement of first births away from teenage years and no catch-up later in life. We attribute these findings to the particularly high opportunity costs of childrearing in Germany."

"The expansion of higher education throughout the OECD—and beyond—is both necessary and desirable. But it is costly, and faces competing imperatives for public spending. Higher education finance is therefore salient to an extent that is not yet fully appreciated in all countries, and is also immensely sensitive politically. This paper sets out the core lessons for financing higher education deriving from economic theory and puts them alongside lessons from country experience. The UK reforms announced in 2004 are assessed against the backdrop of those two elements. A concluding section briefly maps out unfinished business."

"This study analyses whether the Swedish school choice reform, enacted in 1992, had differential effects for students from different socio-economic backgrounds. We use detailed geographical data on students' and schools' locations to construct measures of the degree of potential choice. This allows us to study the effects of choice opportunities among public schools, whereas previous studies have focused on newly opened private schools. Our results indicate that students from a socio-economically disadvantaged or immigrant background did not benefit less from more school choice than those from more advantaged backgrounds. If anything, students from low-income families benefited slightly more than those from higher-income families. However, the differences between groups of students are very small, as are the overall effects of the reform."