The Economics of International Differences in Educational Achievement

No 4925, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: An emerging economic literature over the past decade has made use of international tests of educational achievement to analyze the determinants and impacts of cognitive skills. The cross-country comparative approach provides a number of unique advantages over national studies: It can exploit institutional variation that does not exist within countries; draw on much larger variation than usually available within any country; reveal whether any result is country-specific or more general; test whether effects are systematically heterogeneous in different settings; circumvent selection issues that plague within-country identification by using system-level aggregated measures; and uncover general-equilibrium effects that often elude studies in a single country. The advantages come at the price of concerns about the limited number of country observations, the cross-sectional character of most available achievement data, and possible bias from unobserved country factors like culture. This chapter reviews the economic literature on international differences in educational achievement, restricting itself to comparative analyses that are not possible within single countries and placing particular emphasis on studies trying to address key issues of empirical identification. While quantitative input measures show little impact, several measures of institutional structures and of the quality of the teaching force can account for significant portions of the large international differences in the level and equity of student achievement. Variations in skills measured by the international tests are in turn strongly related to individual labor-market outcomes and, perhaps more importantly, to cross-country variations in economic growth.

Keywords: education production function; international student achievement tests; human capital; cognitive skills (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H40 H52 I20 J24 J31 O15 O40 P50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 112 pages
Date: 2010-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-edu, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-ltv
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (72)

Published - published in: E.A. Hanushek, S. Machin, L. Woessmann (eds.), Handbook of the Economics of Education, Vol. 3, pp. 89-200, Amsterdam: North Holland, 2011

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Related works:
Chapter: The Economics of International Differences in Educational Achievement (2011)
Working Paper: The Economics of International Differences in Educational Achievement (2010)
Working Paper: The Economics of International Differences in Educational Achievement (2010)
Working Paper: The Economics of International Differences in Educational Achievement (2010)
Chapter: The Economics of International Differences in Educational Achievement
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