School Resources and Student Achievement: Evidence From Social and Natural Experiments

The effects of school resources, such as student-to-teacher ratios, qualifications of the teachers, and
school size are of interest because they can be changed through policy and are expected to influence
students. As economists, we are interested in the causal effects of these inputs in order to come up
with policy recommendations. The causal effects of different school resources are, however,
difficult to identify due to selection and sorting of students and teachers into schools. Simply
comparing students exposed to different levels and qualities of school resources yields biased
results if the students also differ in other respects correlated with how well they perform in school.
To account for that, this dissertation exploits variation in school resources induced by social and
natural experiments in institutional settings in order to identify the effects of school resources in
primary education.