Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in ABSTRACTExisting estimates of the labor-market returns to human capital give a distorted picture of the role of skills across different economies. International comparisons of earnings analyses rely almost exclusively on school attainment measures of human capital, and evidence incorporating direct measures of cognitive skills is mostly restricted to early-career workers in the United States. Analysis of the new PIAAC survey of adult skills over the full lifecycle in 22 countries shows that the focus on early-career earnings leads to underestimating the lifetime returns to skills by about one quarter. On average, a one-standarddeviation increase in numeracy skills is associated with an 18 percent wage increase among prime-age workers. But this masks considerable heterogeneity across countries. Eight countries, including all Nordic countries, have returns between 12 and 15 percent, while six are above 21 percent with the largest return being 28 percent in the United States. Estimates are remarkably robust to different earnings and skill measures, additional controls, and various subgroups. Intriguingly, returns to skills are systematically lower in countries with higher union density, stricter employment protection, and larger public-sector shares.

Recent studies conclude that teachers are important for student learning but it remains uncertain what actually determines effective teaching. This study directly peers into the black box of educational production by investigating the relationship between lecture style teaching and student achievement. Based on matched student-teacher data for the US, the estimation strategy exploits between-subject variation to control for unobserved student traits. Results indicate that traditional lecture style teaching is associated with significantly higher student achievement. No support for detrimental effects of lecture style teaching can be found even when evaluating possible selection biases due to unobservable teacher characteristics.JEL Code: I21, C23.

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We use statewide administrative data from Florida to estimate the impact of attending public schools with different grade configurations on student achievement through grade 10. Based on an instrumental variable estimation strategy, we find that students moving from elementary to middle school suffer a sharp drop in student achievement in the transition year. These achievement drops persist through grade 10. We also find that middle school entry increases student absences and is associated with higher grade 10 dropout rates. Transitions to high school in grade nine cause a smaller one-time drop in achievement but do not alter students' performance trajectories. JEL Codes: H52, I21, I28Keywords: Educational production, public schools, grade configuration, middle schools, high schools * We are grateful to the Florida Department of Education for providing the primary dataset for this study, to David Figlio for sharing survey data used in a portion of the analysis, and to John Bishop, Brian Jacob, Paul Peterson, Jonah Rockoff, Ludger Woessmann, two anonymous referees, and seminar participants at Harvard University, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and CESifo for helpful comments. Any errors are our own. † Corresponding Author Grade Configuration and Student Outcomes 1 IntroductionAmong the most basic questions facing policymakers in any education system is how best to group students in different grades across schools. The choice of grade configuration at minimum determines the number of structural school transitions students make, the age at which they make these transitions, and the relative age of the peers to whom they are exposed at various ages. While all of these factors could plausibly influence student outcomes, the literature on differences in student achievement across countries (Hanushek and Woessmann 2011) has largely ignored the issue of grade configuration.In the U.S., a majority of students switch from elementary school to middle school in grade 6 or 7 before entering high school in grade 9. However, alternative paths through primary and secondary schooling were more common historically and remain available to students in many areas. Some students attend K-8 or even K-12 public schools, while others move after elementary school into schools covering both middle and high school grades. The extent of this variation makes the U.S. a valuable potential source of evidence on the role of grade configuration in education production.Recent findings from New York City (Rockoff and Lockwood 2010) indicate that entering a middle school causes a sharp drop in student achievement that persists through grade 8. However, it remains unclear whether this pattern is evident in other settings and whether the negative effect of middle school attendance persists into high school. The latter consideration is critical as a key rationale for the creation of middle schools was to ease students' transition to high school, and simply having experienced a prior school transition may make students more resilient ...

Many American states require that students lacking basic reading proficiency after third grade be retained and remediated. We exploit a discontinuity in retention probabilities under Florida's testbased promotion policy to study its effects on student outcomes through high school. We find large positive effects on achievement that fade out entirely when retained students are compared to their same-age peers, but remain substantial through grade 10 when compared to students in the same grade. Being retained in third grade due to missing the promotion standard increases students' grade point averages and leads them to take fewer remedial courses in high school but has no effect on their probability of graduating.