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‘CEOs’ of public schools in many countries have authority and responsibilities that can greatly affect the quality of schooling. This paper estimates the impact of education CEOs on student outcomes in Israeli elementary schools. We estimate CEO quality in two ways- once using schools that don't switch CEOs and once using schools that do. We show that switches are exogenous and are not correlated with potential outcomes. CEOs' quality positively affects students’ test scores and behavioural outcomes, with pronounced effects for disadvantaged schools. Potential mechanisms show that high-quality CEOs lead to improvements in school priorities, working procedures, and violence reduction.

Empowering women and enhancing children’s early development are two important goals that are often pursued via independent policy initiatives in developing countries. In this paper we study a unique approach that pursues both goals at the same time: empowering mothers through tools that also advance their children’s development. A program operated by AVSI, an Italian NGO, in a poor neighborhood of Quito, Ecuador, targets parents of children from birth to age 5. It provides family advisor-guided parent training sessions once every two weeks for groups of six to eight mothers and their children. We find that the program empowered women in various dimensions, including higher labor force participation and employment, higher likelihood of a full-time job in the formal-sector and higher wages. Treated mothers are also more likely to continue their education, make independent decisions regarding their own finances, have greater role in intra-household decisions, especially on issues involving children’s education and discipline and increase parental inputs into their children’s development. We find that treated children improve their cognitive and non-cognitive skills, for example, they are less likely to repeat a grade or temporarily drop-out from schooling, are less absent from and have improved behaviors in school, have better attitudes towards learning, and achieve higher scores on cognitive tests. Applying a recently suggested factor model of children's relative non-cognitive skills reaffirms our finding of significant gains in children non-cognitive skills. All results hold when we estimate aggregate treatment impacts, use summary indices instead of individual outcomes in order to account for multiple inference, when we use entropy balancing to adjust for differences in pre-treatment covariates, and when we use other robustness checks.

While religions frequently preach preferential treatment of fellow believers, the magnitude and economic implications of religiosity-based discrimination are largely unknown. Religiosity is often confounded with ethnicity, but it varies even within ethnicities and religious denominations. It is also seldom observed in administrative data. This paper exploits a setting that avoids these limitations. We analyse grading decisions in national matriculation exams in Israel, exploiting unique features that reveal student religiosity to the graders, and grader religiosity to the researcher. We find evidence of in-group bias between religious and non-religious groups, but in our setting this effect is very small. There seem to be two main reasons. First, religious in-group bias is limited to male graders only. Moreover, patterns of bunching in the grade distribution suggest the bias is primarily due to the religious—rather than secular—men. This is a small fraction of the grader population. A second potential reason is that many graders live in integrated communities. Our evidence suggests that living and working in close proximity to people with different levels of religiosity attenuates discrimination.

We study the impact of financial incentives on higher education decisions and the choice of major. We rely on a reform whereby Israeli kibbutzim shifted from their traditional policy of equal sharing to productivity-based wages, using for identification the staggered implementation of this reform.\ud In this setting of very low initial returns to education, we find that the dramatic increase in the rate of return and its sharp variation across fields of study led to a large increase in the probability of receiving a Bachelor’s degree, especially in STEM fields of study that are expected to yield higher financial returns. men and women.\ud

We use the discontinuous function of enrollment known as Maimonides Rule as an instrument for class size in large Israeli samples from 2002-2011. As in the 1991 data analyzed by Angrist and Lavy (1999), Maimonides Rule still has a strong first stage. In contrast with the earlier Israeli estimates, however, Maimonides-based instrumental variables estimates using more recent data show no effect of class size on achievement. The new data also reveal substantial enrollment sorting near Maimonides cutoffs, with too many schools having enrollment values that just barely produce an extra class. A modified rule that uses data on students’ birthdays to compute statutory enrollment in the absence of enrollment manipulation also generates a precisely estimated zero. In older data, the original Maimonides Rule is unrelated to socioeconomic characteristics, while in more recent data, the original rule is unrelated to socioeconomic characteristics conditional on a few controls. Enrollment manipulation therefore appears to be innocuous: neither the original negative effects nor the recent data zeros seem likely to be manipulation artifacts.

We study the spillover effects of a reform that substantially increased the returns to schooling in kibbutzim, socialist-oriented communities in Israel. This reform, which induced kibbutz students to improve their high-school academic performance, spilled over to their non-kibbutz peers who attended the same schools. In the short run, the peers improved their high-school outcomes and shifted to courses with higher financial returns. In the long run, they completed more years of post-secondary schooling and increased their earnings. We discuss two possible spillover channels: standard classroom peer effects and increased salience of the relationship between education and financial success.

This article examines the dynamic effects of a teachers’ pay for performance experiment on long-term outcomes at adulthood. The program led to a gradual increase in university education of the treated high school students, reaching an increase of 0.25 years of schooling by age 28–30. The effects on employment and earnings were initially negative, coinciding with a higher rate of enrolment in university, but became positive and significant with time. These gains are largely mediated by the positive effect of the program on several high school outcomes, including quantitative and qualitative gains in the high-stakes matriculation exams.

This study examines the role of implicit and explicit stereotypes behind gender-discriminatory behavior. The empirical context is the grading discriminatory behavior of math teachers in experimental settings. Previous observational studies demonstrated that math teachers show gender bias when grading papers. The mechanisms behind this behavior are mostly unexplored. We asked teachers to grade gender-manipulated exam papers and measured their grading behavior and implicit and explicit gender stereotypes. We found that implicit gender stereotypes and underestimating own implicit stereotypes were associated with boy-favoring grading behavior. Reducing implicit gender stereotypes and exposing teachers to their implicit biases may promote gender equality in schools.

This paper uses a natural experiment in Israel to assess the impact of school teaching resources and how it is used, “time-on-task”, on academic achievements and noncognitive outcomes. It exploits variation induced by a change in the funding formula that reduced instructional resources funding for some schools and increased them for others. The results suggest that increased school resources and students’ spending more time at school and on key tasks all lead to increased academic achievements with no behavioral costs. Separate estimations of the effect of increasing subject-specific instructional time per week also show positive and significant effects on math, science, and English test scores and small and nonsignificant effects on Hebrew test scores. However, there are no cross effects of additional instructional time across subjects. This evidence is robust to using different identification strategies. The evidence also shows that a longer school week increases the time that students spend on homework without reducing social and school satisfaction and without increasing school violence.

We estimate the effect of primary school teachers' gender biases on boys' and girls' academic achievements during middle and high school and on the choice of advanced level courses in math and sciences during high school in Tel-Aviv, Israel. We measure bias using class-gender differences in scores between school exams graded by teachers and national exams graded blindly by external examiners. For identification, we rely on the random assignment of teachers and students to classes in primary schools. Our results suggest that assignment to a teacher with a greater bias in favor of girls (boys) has positive effects on girls' (boys') achievements. Such gender biases have also positive impact on girls' (boys') enrollment in advanced level math courses in high school. These results suggest that teachers' biased behavior at early stages of schooling has long run implications for occupational choices and earnings at adulthood, because enrollment in advanced courses in math and science in high school is a prerequisite for post-secondary schooling in engineering, computer science and so on.

We study the impact of financial incentives on higher education decisions and the choice of major. We rely on a reform whereby Israeli kibbutzim shifted from their traditional policy of equal sharing to productivity-based wages. We use for identification the staggered implementation of this reform in different kibbutzim. In this setting of very low initial returns to education, we find that the dramatic increase in the rate of return and its sharp variation across fields of study led to a large increase in the probability of receiving a Bachelor degree, especially in STEM fields of study that are expected to yield higher financial returns. For men this increase was largely in computer science and engineering, and for women in biology, chemistry and computer science. Our findings suggest that investment in higher education and the choice of major are responsive to increases in the return to education for both men and women.

Recent research has focused on what shapes gender differences in academic achievement and students’ choice of university field of study. In this paper we examine how teachers’ gender role attitudes and stereotypes influence the gender gap by affecting the school environment. We explore the extent to which teachers’ gender bias in high school influences students’ school attendance and academic performance in high-stakes university admission exams and students’ choice of university field of study. We use data from a large number of high schools in Greece, where the performance in these high-stakes exams determines university admission. We measure teachers’ bias as the difference between a high school student’s school exam score and national exam score. We then define a teacher bias measure at the class level by the difference between boys’ and girls’ average gap between the school score and the national score. We link teachers over time to obtain a persistent teacher bias measure based on multiple classes, and to estimate the effect for later cohorts’ performance. We find a very high correlation of within-teacher gender biases measured in different classes, which reveals high persistency in teachers’ gender favoritism behavior. We then find substantial effects of these teacher biases on students’ school attendance and performance in university admission exams, quality of enrolled degree and the given field of study at the university. We also find that gender biases are more prevalent among low value added teachers, while the more effective teachers have an approximately neutral gender attitude. This suggests that less effective teachers can harm their students twice, by being a bad teacher and by discriminating against one of the genders.

We investigate the impacts of separating students in Israel from pre-existing social relationships during the transition from elementary to middle school on their academic progress. We define several types of friendships using students’ self-defined friendship nomination and rely for identification on the random assignment of students to classes within a given school. Our results suggest that the number of friends has positive or negative effects on students’ educational outcomes, depending on the type of and on friends’ socioeconomic background. These gains might be partly mediated through greater cooperation, reduction in violent behaviour and improvements in social satisfaction in class.

We analyze the long-term effects of a high school remedial education program almost two decades after its implementation. Treated students experienced an 11% increase in completed years of postseco...

Religions often preach preferential treatment of fellow believers, but the magnitude and economic implications of religion-based discrimination are largely unknown, partly because religiosity is often confounded with ethnicity. We analyze grading decisions in national matriculation exams in Israel, exploiting unique features that reveal student religiosity to the graders, and grader religiosity to the researcher. We find evidence of religiosity-based ingroup bias. Substantively, however, the effects of this bias are small. One reason is that religious bias is entirely driven by men. Furthermore, patterns of bunching in the grade distribution suggest the primary source of bias is the religious (rather than secular) men – a small fraction of the grader population. A second potential reason is that many graders live in integrated communities. Indeed, we find that living and working in close proximity to people with different levels of religiosity appears to attenuate religion-based discrimination.

The time that children spend in school varies across countries. Do these differences explain international gaps in pupils' academic achievements? In this article I estimate the effects of instructional time on students' achievement using PISA 2006 data, which include data samples from over 50 countries. I find that instructional time has a positive and significant effect on test scores, and that the effect is much lower in developing countries. Evidence also suggests that the productivity of instructional time is higher in countries which implemented school accountability measures or that gave schools autonomy in budgetary decisions and in hiring/firing teachers.\ud

This article investigates whether schooling outcomes at age 15 are affected by the duration of maternity leave, i.e. the time mothers spend at home with their new‐born before returning to work. We exploit an unanticipated reform in Austria which extended the maximum duration of paid and job protected parental leave from 12 to 24 months for births as of 1 July, 1990. Using PISA data from the cohorts 1990 and 1987, we find no significant overall impact of the parental leave extension on standardised test scores. However, subgroup analyses reveal strong heterogeneity by maternal education and child gender.\ud \ud

We present evidence about the ways that school superintendents add value in Israel’s primary and middle schools. Superintendents are the CEOs of a cluster of schools with powers to affect the quality of schooling, and we extend the approach used in recent literature to measure teachers’ value added, to assess school superintendents. We exploit a quasi-random matching of superintendent and schools, and estimate that superintendent value added has positive and significant effects on primary and middle school students’ test scores in math, Hebrew, and English. One standard deviation improvement in superintendent value added increases test scores by about 0.04 of a standard deviation in the test score distribution. The effect doesn’t vary with students’ socio-economic background, is highly non-linear, increases sharply for superintendents in the highest-quartile of the value added distribution, and is larger for female superintendents. We explore several mechanisms for these effects and find that superintendents with higher value added are associated with more focused school priorities and more clearly defined working procedures, but no effect on school resources and no effect on total teachers’ on the job and external training, although there is a significant effect on the composition of the former. Another important effect is that schools with higher quality superintendents are more likely to address school climate, violence and bullying, and implement related interventions which lead to lower violence in school. A new superintendent is also associated with a higher likelihood that the school principal is replaced.

This paper uses an unusual pay reform to test the responsiveness of investment in schooling to changes in redistribution schemes that increase the rate of return to education. We exploit an episode where different Israeli kibbutzim shifted from equal sharing to productivity-based wages in different years and find that students in kibbutzim that reformed earlier invested more in high school education and, in the long run, also in post-secondary schooling. We further show that the effect is mainly driven by students in kibbutzim that reformed to a larger degree. Our findings support the prediction that education is highly responsive to changes in the redistribution policy.

Cognitive performance during high-stakes exams can be affected by random disturbances that, even if transitory, may have permanent consequences. We evaluate this hypothesis among Israeli students who took a series of matriculation exams between 2000 and 2002. Exploiting variation across the same student taking multiple exams, we find that transitory PM2.5 exposure is associated with a significant decline in student performance. We then examine these students in 2010 and find that PM2.5 exposure during exams is negatively associated with postsecondary educational attainment and earnings. The results highlight how reliance on noisy signals of student quality can lead to allocative inefficiency. (JEL I21, I23, I26, J24, J31, Q51, Q53)

Recent lab and field experiments suggest that women are less effective than men in a competitive environment. In this paper I examine how individual performance in a real work place is affected by a competitive environment and by its gender mix. The competition is among math, English and Language teachers who participated in a rank order tournament that rewarded teachers with large cash bonuses based on the test performance of their classes. The evidence suggest that the average ranking, winning rate and awarded prize did not differ by gender nor between teachers in competition groups with only female teachers or with both genders. I also find that the direct impact of the bonus program on students' outcomes did not vary by male and female teachers or by the type of competitive environment in terms of gender mix of the participants. As for mechanisms that can explain these results, I found no differences by either gender or by the gender mix of the competition group in teachers' awareness and familiarity with the program and its rules, and in effort and teaching methods. Women though were more pessimistic about the effectiveness of teachers' performance pay and more realistic than men about their likelihood of winning bonuses.

We study ability peer effects in English secondary schools using data on four cohorts of students taking age-14 national tests and measuring peers' ability by prior achievements at age 11. Our identification is based on within-pupil regressions exploiting variation in achievements across three compulsory subjects tested at age 14 and age 11. Using this novel strategy, we find significant and sizable negative effects arising from bad peers at the bottom of the ability distribution but little evidence that average peer quality and good peers matter. However, these results are heterogeneous, with girls benefiting from academically bright peers and boys not.

This paper estimates the effect of the childhood environment on a large array of social and economic outcomes lasting almost 60 years, for both the affected cohorts and for their children. To do this, we exploit a natural experiment provided by the 1949 Magic Carpet operation, where over 50,000 Yemenite immigrants were airlifted to Israel. The Yemenites, who lacked any formal schooling or knowledge of a western-style culture or bureaucracy, believed that they were being "redeemed," and put their trust in the Israeli authorities to make decisions about where they should go and what they should do. As a result, they were scattered across the country in essentially a random fashion, and as we show, the environmental conditions faced by immigrant children were not correlated with other factors that affected the long-term outcomes of individuals. We construct three summary measures of the childhood environment: 1) whether the home had running water, sanitation and electricity; 2) whether the locality of residence was in an urban environment with a good economic infrastructure; and 3) whether the locality of residence was a Yemenite enclave. We find that children who were placed in a better environment (i.e. with better sanitary and infrastructure conditions) were more likely to obtain higher education, marry at an older age, have fewer children, and work at age 55. They were also more likely to be assimilated into Israeli society, to be less religious, and have more worldly tastes in music and food. The estimated effects are much more pronounced for women than for men. We find weaker and somewhat mixed effects on health outcomes, and no effect on political views. We do find an effect on the next generation - children who lived in a better environment grew up to have children who achieved higher educational attainment.

This paper presents evidence on the child-quantity/child-quality trade-off using quasi-experimental variation due to twin births and preferences for a mixed sibling-sex composition, as well as ethnic differences in the effects of these variables. Our sample includes groups with very high fertility. An innovation in our econometric approach is the juxtaposition of results from multiple instrumental variables (IV) strategies, capturing the effects of fertility over different ranges for different sorts of people. To increase precision, we develop an estimator that combines different instrument sets across partially-overlapping parity-specific sub-samples. Our results are remarkably consistent in showing no evidence of a quantity-quality trade-off.

This article uses the mass migration wave to Israel in the 1990s to examine the impact of immigrant concentration during elementary school on the long-term academic outcomes of native students in high school. The results suggest that the overall presence of immigrants in a grade had an adverse effect on the chances of passing the high school matriculation exam, which is necessary to attend college. This result is robust to a variety of alternative specifications. We also perform a ‘placebo’ analysis which shows that the high school outcomes of natives are affected only by the immigrant concentration in their own 5th grade class.

The Israeli matriculation certificate is a prerequisite for most postsecondary schooling. In a randomized trial, we attempted to increase certification rates among low-achievers with cash incentives. The experiment used a school-based randomization design offering awards to all who passed their exams in treated schools. This led to a substantial increase in certification rates for girls but had no effect on boys. Affected girls had a relatively high ex ante chance of certification. The increase in girls' matriculation rates translated into an increased likelihood of college attendance. Female matriculation rates increased partly because treated girls devoted extra time to exam preparation. (JEL I21, I28, J16)

This paper reports estimates of the causal effects of a 50 percent increase in the salary of headmasters of high schools in Israel. The results suggest that the program led to significant improvements in twelfth-grade students' academic achievements. However, the effect was relatively modest, comprising increases of about 5–10 percent in the school mean matriculation rate, average score and number of subjects and credit units taken in matriculation programs. Based on these results and the lack of evidence regarding the effect of increasing teachers' salary, it seems that priority should be given to paying higher wages to school principals.

Schools and teachers are often said to be a source of stereotypes that harm girls. This paper tests for the existence of gender stereotyping and discrimination by public high-school teachers in Israel. It uses a natural experiment based on blind and non-blind scores that students receive on matriculation exams in their senior year. Using data on test results in several subjects in the humanities and sciences, I found, contrary to expectations, that male students face discrimination in each subject. These biases widen the female–male achievement difference because girls outperform boys in all subjects, except English, and at all levels of the curriculum. The bias is evident in all segments of the ability and performance distribution and is robust to various individual controls. Several explanations based on differential behavior between boys and girls are not supported empirically. However, the size of the difference is very sensitive to teachers' characteristics, suggesting that the bias against male students is the result of teachers', and not students', behavior.

School quality and grade completion by students are shown to be directly linked, leading to very different perspectives on educational policy in developing countries. Unique panel data on primary school age children in Egypt permit estimation of behavioral models of school leaving. Students perceive differences in school quality, measured as expected achievement improvements in a given school, and act on it. Specifically, holding constant the student's own ability and achievement, a student is much less likely to remain in school if attending a low quality school rather than a high quality school. This individually rationale behavior suggests that common arguments about a trade-off between quality and access to schools may misstate the real issue and lead to public investment in too little quality. Further, because of this behavioral linkage, there is an achievement bias such that common estimates of rates of return to years of school will be overstated. The paper demonstrates the analytical importance of employing output-based measures of school quality.

This paper investigates the effects of environmental conditions during pregnancy on later life outcomes using quasi-experimental variation created by the immigration of Ethiopian Jews to Israel in May 24th 1991. Children in utero prior to immigration faced dramatic differences in medical care technologies, prenatal conditions, and prenatal care at the move from Ethiopia to Israel. One of the major differences was adequacy of micronutrient supplements, particularly iodine, iron and folic acid. We find that children exposed in earlier stage of the pregnancy to better environmental conditions in utero have higher education attainment (lower repetition and dropout rates and higher Baccalaureate rate) and higher education quality. The average treatment effect we estimate are driven mainly by effect on girls. We find however, no effect on birth weight, suggesting that our findings are not driven by health improvements.

This paper studies the effect of mothers' education on fertility in a mostly Muslim population with very low female labor force participation. We first show that a removal of travel restrictions on Israeli Arabs had raised female education and had almost no effect on male education. Next, we show that it lowered fertility rates among exposed women, which we interpret as an effect of female education on fertility. We rule out labor-force participation, age at marriage, marriage and divorce rates and spousal labor-force participation and earnings as confounding factors or as mechanisms but find that spousal education and children quality play a role in the fertility decline. We provide a variety of robustness tests that rule out other channels by which the removal of the travel restrictions could have affected fertility directly. These results are particularly interesting and important for the context of many Muslim countries with low rates of female labor force participation.\ud \ud

There is renewed interest in ways to enhance secondary education, especially among disadvantaged students. This study evaluates the short-term effects of a remedial education programme that provided additional instruction to under-performing high school students in Israel. The programme targeted 10th–12th graders who needed additional help to pass the matriculation exams. Using a comparison group of schools that enrolled in the programme later and implementing a differences-indifferences estimation strategy, we found that the programme raised the school mean matriculation rate by 3.3 percentage points. This gain reflects mainly an effect on targeted participants and the absence of externalities on their untreated peers. The programme was found to be less cost-effective than two alternative interventions based on incentives for teachers and students.

This paper examines the dynamic effects of a teachers’ pay for performance experiment on long-term outcomes at adulthood. The program led to a gradual increase in university education of the high school treated students, reaching a gain of 0.25 years of schooling at age 28-30. The effects on employment and earnings were initially negative, coinciding with a higher enrollment rate in university, but became positive and significant with time. These gains are largely mediated by the positive effect of the program on several high school outcomes, including quantity and quality gains in the high stake matriculation exams.

In this paper, we estimate the effect of primary school teachers’ gender biases on boys’ and girls’ academic achievements during middle and high school and on the choice of advanced level courses in math and sciences during high school. For identification, we rely on the random assignments of teachers and students to classes in primary schools. Our results suggest that teachers’ biases favoring boys have an asymmetric effect by gender— positive effect on boys’ achievements and negative effect on girls’. Such gender biases also impact students’ enrollment in advanced level math courses in high school—boys positively and girls negatively. These results suggest that teachers’ biased behavior at early stage of schooling have long run implications for occupational choices and earnings at adulthood, because enrollment in advanced courses in math and science in high school is a prerequisite for post-secondary schooling in engineering, computer science and so on. This impact is heterogeneous, being larger for children from families where the father is more educated than the mother and larger on girls from low socioeconomic background.

In this paper, we estimate the effect of primary school teachers’ gender biases on boys’ and girls’ academic achievements during middle and high school and on the choice of advanced level courses in math and sciences during high school. For identification, we rely on the random assignments of teachers and students to classes in primary schools. Our results suggest that teachers’ biases favoring boys have an asymmetric effect by gender—positive effect on boys’ achievements and negative effect on girls’. Such gender biases also impact students’ enrollment in advanced level math courses in high school—boys positively and girls negatively. These results suggest that teachers’ biased behavior at early stage of schooling have long run implications for occupational choices and earnings at adulthood, because enrollment in advanced courses in math and science in high school is a prerequisite for post-secondary schooling in engineering, computer science and so on. This impact is heterogeneous, being larger for children from families where the father is more educated than the mother and larger on girls from low socioeconomic background.

Proposals to use teachers’ performance incentives have recently attracted considerable attention. However, there is very little experience with applying incentives in schools. This paper provides evidence on the causal effects of two programs: the first provided the school and its teachers with monetary performance incentives and the second with additional conventional resources. The assignment of schools to the two programs was not random; therefore, identification is a central issue in the empirical analysis. The empirical results suggest that schools’ and teachers’ group monetary incentives caused significant gains in many dimensions of students’ outcomes. Endowing schools with more resources also led to improvement in student performance. However, the comparison based on cost equivalency suggests that the teachers’ incentive intervention is much more cost effective.

Cognitive performance is critical to productivity in many occupations and potentially linked to pollution exposure. We evaluate this potentially important relationship by estimating the effect of pollution exposure on standardized test scores among Israeli high school high-stakes tests (2000-2002). Since students take multiple exams on multiple days in the same location after each grade, we can adopt a fixed effects strategy estimating models with city, school, and student fixed effects. We focus on fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and carbon monoxide (CO), which are considered to be two of the most dangerous forms of air pollution. We find that while PM2.5 and CO levels are only weakly correlated with each other, both exhibit a robust negative relationship with test scores. We also find that PM2.5, which is thought to be particularly damaging for asthmatics, has a larger negative impact on groups with higher rates of asthma. For CO, which affects neurological functioning, the effect is more homogenous across demographic groups. Furthermore, we find that exposure to either pollutant is associated with a significant decline in the probability of not receiving a Bagrut certificate, which is required for college entrance in Israel. The results suggest that the gain from improving air quality may be underestimated by a narrow focus on health impacts. Insofar as air pollution may lead to reduced cognitive performance, the consequences of pollution may be relevant for a variety of everyday activities that require mental acuity. Moreover, by temporarily lowering the productivity of human capital, high pollution levels lead to allocative inefficiency as students with lower human capital are assigned a higher rank than their more qualified peers. This may lead to inefficient allocation of workers across occupations, and possibly a less productive workforce.

Cognitive performance during high-stakes exams can be affected by random disturbances that, even if transitory, may have permanent consequences for long-term schooling attainment and labor market outcomes. We evaluate this hypothesis among Israeli high school students who took the high school high stakes matriculation exams between 2000 and 2002. As a source of random (transitory) shocks to high-stakes matriculation test scores we use exposure to ambient air pollution during the day of the exam. We find a significant and negative relationship between PM2.5 exposure during each of these examinations and a student's exam score, and between average exposure across the exams and a student's composite matriculation score. Using 2SLS with PM2.5 as our instrument for a student's composite score, we find that scores have a significant long-term effect on post-secondary educational attainment and earnings during adulthood. The results suggest that random disturbances during high-stakes examinations can have long-term consequences for schooling and labor force outcomes, and highlight the drawbacks of using high-stakes examinations in university admissions.

The relationship between teachers' characteristics and their pupils' achievement has been the subject of many studies. Most of this research focuses on the impact of teacher salaries, experience, and measures of teachers' pre-service training such as educational background. The effect of on-the-job or in-service training has received much less attention. In this paper, we estimate the effect of in-service teacher training on children's reading and mathematics achievement in Jerusalem elementary schools. The training was based on pedagogical methods developed in US schools. Our research uses a matched-comparison design which exploits the fact that only a few schools received extra funds for training. Differences-in-differences, regression, and nonparametric matching estimates are reported. The results suggest that the training received by teachers in the non-religious branch of the Jerusalem school system led to an improvement in their pupils' test scores. The estimates for religious schools are not clear cut, but this may be because the training program in religious schools started later and was implemented on a smaller scale. The estimates for non-religious schools suggest that, at least in this case, teacher training provided a less costly means of increasing test scores than reducing class size or adding school hours.