Education Design Matters

Abstract

Education is an investment in human capital which has large positive impacts upon individual and social outcomes. This implies that policymakers have an enormous responsibility when using scarce resources as to design the education system. Policymakers like to make informed decisions, but this requires knowledge about the consequences of intended policies. This thesis aims at contributing to this knowledge by means of four self-contained chapters on the impact of design features in education. It contains, among others, a chapter on ability peer effects in the classroom. If peer effects exist, reorganizing students across classes could increase aggregate student performance without spending additional resources