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This paper explores the relationship between students' digital competence acquisition, teaching practices, and teacher professional learning activities. We analysed insights provided by 59,452 teachers through SELFIE, an online self-reflection tool for schools' digital capacity. Using ordinary least squares regressions with school fixed effects, we focus on students' digital competence and find that the use of digital technologies in cross-curricular projects is the teaching practice most related to the acquisition of students' digital competence. On the other hand, we also find that teachers' participation in teacher networks is highly correlated with the implementation of cross-curricular projects with digital technologies. The results further suggest that the use of digital technologies for teacher collaboration (in professional learning activities and in implementing cross-curricular projects) can have great potential and importance in the digital age, both for teachers and learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education is considered an important factor of economic growth, employment and social inclusion. However, the economic crisis has put the need to achieve educational goals in the most efficient way ever more to the fore. The main objective of this paper is to assess the spending efficiency of European compulsory educational systems, creating a ranking of countries based on the efficiency scores of their systems using a number of standard variables from the literature. To this end, we also present a methodological innovation that combines Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with discrete Multiple Criteria Evaluation (MCE), two methods that we consider complementary if used for providing a performance analysis. Moreover, both methods identify a set of common variables which are associated with higher levels of efficiency in educational systems (e.g. some characteristics of teachers, the stock of adults' human capital and lower expenditures per student). The results show that findings using DEA are largely confirmed by MCE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human capital is supposed to be an important factor for innovation and economic development. However, the long-run impact of human capital on current innovation and economic development is still a black box, in particular at the regional level. Therefore, this paper makes the link between the past and the present. Using a large new dataset on regional human capital and other factors in the 19th and 20th century, we find that past regional human capital is a key factor explaining current regional disparities in innovation and economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent contribution, Redding and Schott [2003. "Distance, Skill Deepening and Development: Will Peripheral Countries Ever Get Rich?" Journal of Development Economics 72 (2): 515-541. doi:10.1016/S0304- 3878(03)00118-4] add human capital to a two sector NEG model, highlighting that remoteness represents a penalty that gives disincentives to invest in human capital. But is this hypothesis consistent with long-term evidence? We test the persistence of this effect at the regional level in an historical setting. The results show that market access has a significant positive influence on human capital in OLS, Tobit and IV regression models. Thus, the paper confirms the 'penalty of remoteness' hypothesis for Europe in the long run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We find a relationship between geographic factors and numeracy in more than 300 regions of Europe around the year 1900. We argue that the distribution of land ownership is a plausible mechanism, given that it is related to the geographic factors under study. Consistent with theoretical studies in the Unified Growth Theory framework, we find that inequality in land distribution has a negative correlation with human capital formation as landowners did not have incentives to promote educational institutions or were not willing to pay the necessary taxes. This study explains a substantial share of the differences in development gradients between rural European regions in a historical perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent theoretical advances reveal the importance of human capital for long-run economic growth. However, the absence of data makes it difficult to measure human capital before 1870 at the national level, let alone at the regional level within countries. By using the age heaping method and a large, new data set, we approximate the numeracy values in more than 570 regions in Europe between 1790 and 1880. The results indicate a significant gap in numeracy levels between advanced west and central European countries and the rest of Europe. Nevertheless, differences in basic numeracy between and within countries became smaller over the nineteenth century, as the periphery solved its basic numeracy problem. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]