Eric A Hanushek
Biographic Data
| ID | 293553 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eric A Hanushek |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eric A |
| FAMILY NAME | Hanushek |
| SIGNATURE | HANUSHEK E A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hoover Institution |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7090-7535 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 72 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 906 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 71 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1973 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
State differences in pathways to school leadership and in achievement growth
Patience and Subnational Differences in Human Capital: Regional Analysis with Facebook Interests
Decisions to invest in human capital depend on people's time preferences. This paper shows that differences in patience are closely related to substantial subnational differences in educational achievement, leading to new perspectives on long-standing within-country disparities. We use social media data—Facebook interests—to construct novel regional measures of patience within Italy and the United States. The approach is first validated with a cr…
Employer Learning and the Dynamics of Returns to Universities: Evidence from Chinese Elite Education during University Expansion
This paper estimates the return to an elite-university education over a college graduate’s career in contemporary China. After allowing for university selectivity by including individual admission scores, we find a substantial premium for graduating from an elite Chinese university at the job entry that declines quickly in early career before starting to return. Results are entirely driven by cohorts entering college after the 1999 higher-educati…
Global universal basic skills: Current deficits and implications for world development
Patience, Risk-Taking, and Human Capital Investment Across Countries
Patience and risk-taking—two preference components that steer intertemporal decision-making—are fundamental to human capital investment decisions. To understand how they contribute to international skill differences, we combine Programme for International Student Assessment tests with the Global Preference Survey. We find that opposing effects of patience (positive) and risk-taking (negative) together account for two-thirds of the cross-country v…
Addressing cross-national generalizability in educational impact evaluation
The Evolution of Charter School Quality
Studies of the charter sector typically compare charters and traditional public schools at a point in time. These comparisons are potentially misleading, because many charter‐related reforms require time to generate results. We study quality dynamics among charter schools in the State of Texas from 2001 to 2011. School quality in the charter sector was initially highly variable and on average lower than in traditional public schools. However, exi…
Testing, Accountability, and the American Economy
Recent research highlights the importance of academic achievement as a determinant of economic well-being. Individual earnings, income growth in states, and national growth rates for GDP are each significantly determined by the population's cognitive skills, which in turn are proxied by scores on standardized achievement tests. This well-documented relationship between education and economic outcomes underscores the importance of using test infor…
General Education, Vocational Education, and Labor-Market Outcomes over the Lifecycle
Policy debates about the balance of vocational and general education programs focus on the school-to-work transition. But with rapid technological change, gains in youth employment from vocational education may be offset by less adaptability and thus diminished employment later in life. To test our main hypothesis that any relative labor-market advantage of vocational education decreases with age, we employ a difference-in-differences approach th…
Education, Economics of
The Knowledge Capital of Nations: Education and the Economics of Growth
A rigorous, pathbreaking analysis demonstrating that a country's prosperity is directly related in the long run to the skills of its population. In this book Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann make a simple, central claim, developed with rigorous theoretical and empirical support: knowledge is the key to a country's development. Of course, every country acknowledges the importance of developing human capital, but Hanushek and Woessmann argue that…
Returns to skills around the world: Evidence from Piaac
Time in Education: Introduction
At first blush it seems almost silly to have a Feature on the impact of added time in instruction on student outcomes. After all, a higher dosage of teaching should obviously produce more learning. In reality, the prior research on this question has been quite inconclusive. This Feature, however, moves knowledge forward a considerable distance. The two articles – by Victor Lavy and by Steven Rivkin and Jeffrey Schiman – advance our understanding …
Economic growth in developing countries: The role of human capital
Urban Education: Location and Opportunity in the United States
The study of location and schooling has become a vibrant area of research in recent years. This article identifies the current state in both theoretical and empirical analyses of schools and location. It begins with a description of housing markets and schools in the United States. It then provides an overview of the relevant theoretical arguments on both location and local public good provision. The two primary relevant models involve urban loca…
The Distribution of Teacher Quality and Implications for Policy
It has become commonplace to measure teacher quality in terms of teacher value-added. Operationally, this means evaluating teachers according to the learning gains of students on various achievement tests. Existing research consistently shows large variations in teacher effectiveness, much of which is within schools as opposed to between schools. The policy implications of these variations are dramatic. But the underlying statistical modeling has…
Do better schools lead to more growth? Cognitive skills, economic outcomes, and causation
We provide evidence that the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth reflects a causal effect of cognitive skills and supports the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking student achievement across countries, over time, and along the within-country distribution. Extensive sensitivity analyses of cross-country growth regressions generate remarkably stable results acr…
Does school autonomy make sense everywhere? Panel estimates from Pisa
Schooling, educational achievement, and the Latin American growth puzzle
The Economics of International Differences in Educational Achievement
The economic value of higher teacher quality
Generalizations about Using Value-Added Measures of Teacher Quality
The extensive investigation of the contribution of teachers to student achievement produces two generally accepted results. First, there is sub stantial variation in teacher quality as measured by the value added to achievement or future aca demic attainment or earnings. Second, variables often used to determine entry into the profession and salaries, including post-graduate schooling, experience, and licensing examination scores, appear to expla…
The Quality and Distribution of Teachers under the No Child Left Behind Act
The main effects of No Child Left Behind on the quality of teaching are likely to come through two provisions of the act. First, NCLB establishes benchmarks based on test score pass rates that schools must meet in order to remain in good standing and avoid sanctions. Since teachers are central to student performance, this accountability component of NCLB is likely to have direct effects on both the demand for and supply of teachers and therefore …
New Evidence about Brown v. Board of Education: The Complex Effects of School Racial Composition on Achievement
Uncovering the effect of school racial composition is difficult because racial mixing is not accidental but instead an outcome of government and family choices. Using rich panel data on the achievement of Texas students, we disentangle racial composition effects from other aspects of school quality and from differences in abilities and family background. The estimates strongly indicate that a higher percentage of black schoolmates reduces achieve…
Does Pollution Increase School Absences
We examine the effect of air pollution on school absences using administrative data for elementary and middle school children in 39 of the largest school districts in Texas merged with air quality information maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency. We address potentially confounding factors with a difference-in-difference-in-differences strategy that controls for persistent characteristics of schools, years, and attendance periods. Of …
Does Educational Tracking Affect Performance and Inequality? Differences‐ in‐Differences Evidence Across Countries
Even though some countries track students into differing-ability schools by age 10, others keep their entire secondary-school system comprehensive. To estimate the effects of such institutional differences in the face of country heterogeneity, we employ an international differences-in-differences approach. We identify tracking effects by comparing differences in outcome between primary and secondary school across tracked and non-tracked systems. …
The Trade-off between Child Quantity and Quality
An empirical investigation of trade-offs between number of children and their scholastic performance confirms that family size directly affects children's achievement. Though parents show no favoritism to first-born children, being early in the birth order implies a distinct advantage, entirely because of the higher probability of being in a small family. Recent large changes in family size explain a portion of aggregate test score declines, but …
The Impact of Differential Expenditures on School Performance
Two decades of research into educational production functions have produced startlingly consistent results: Variations in school expenditures are not systematically related to variations in student performance. Enormous differences in teacher quality exist, but differences in teacher skill are not strongly related to educational backgrounds, amount of teaching experience, or teaching in small classes. Further, more skilled teachers simply are not…
The Role Of Education Quality For Economic Growth
The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions.This paper reviews the role of education in promoting economic well-being, with a particular focus on the role of educational quality.It concludes that there is strong evidence that the cognitive skills of the population -rather than mere school attainment -a…
Does school accountability lead to improved student performance
The leading school reform policy in the United States revolves around strong accountability of schools with consequences for performance. The federal government's involvement through the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 reinforces the prior movement of many states toward policies based on measured student achievement. Analysis of state achievement growth as measured by the National Assessment of Educational progress shows that accountability syst…
The Failure of Input‐based Schooling Policies
In an effort to improve the quality of schools, governments around the world have dramatically increased the resources devoted to them. By concentrating on inputs and ignoring the incentives within schools, the resources have yielded little in the way of general improvement in student achievement. This paper provides a review of the United States and international evidence on the effectiveness of such input policies. It then contrasts the impact …
Does school autonomy make sense everywhere? Panel estimates from Pisa
Throwing Money at Schools
The conventional wisdom about public schools is that they face serious problems in terms of performance and that improving schools requires additional money. However, the available evidence suggests that there is no relationship between expenditures and the achievement of students and that such traditional remedies as reducing class sizes or hiring better trained teachers are unlikely to improve matters. Furthermore, there is little reason to bel…
Schooling, educational achievement, and the Latin American growth puzzle
Harming the Best: How Schools Affect the Black-White Achievement Gap
Sizeable achievement differences by race appear in early grades, but substantial uncertainty exists about the impact of school quality on the black‐white achievement gap and particularly about its evolution across different parts of the achievement distribution. Texas administrative data show that the overall growth in the achievement gap between third and eighth grades is larger for students with higher initial achievement and that specific teac…
The dynamics of the housing market: A stock adjustment model of housing consumption
Money Might Matter Somewhere: A Response to Hedges, Laine, and Greenwald
Over the past quarter century, there has been an attempt to use systematic statistical analysis to inform educational policy. This analysis has not been greeted enthusiastically by educators, particularly because it has clearly indicated that their current operations are inefficient and broadly ineffective (Hanushek, 1989). The recent analysis of Larry Hedges, Richard Laine, and Rob Greenwald (1994) addresses the overall conclusions in my article…
Measuring Investment in Education
Historic debates about the measurement of capital are even more complicated in the case of education and human capital. As extensive research demonstrates, education resources are not consistently related to student performance in existing elementary and secondary schools. This inefficiency in public schools implies that spending and resource measures do not accurately capture variations in school quality. This finding then has clear implications…
Improving Educational Efficiency in Developing Countries: What do we know?[1]
[1] The World Bank does not accept responsibility for the views expressed herein, which are those of the author(s) and should not be attributed to the World Bank or its affiliated organisations. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions are the results of research or analysis supported by the Bank; they do not necessarily represent official policy of the Bank
The Single Salary Schedule and Other Issues of Teacher Pay
The importance of teacher quality for determining student outcomes is now well established. At the same time, the translation of what is known about teacher quality into effective policy is far from being institutionalized. The simplest summary of research into teacher quality is that some teachers are dramatically more effective than others but that common measures of quality are largely uncorrelated with true quality. Thus, for example, we cont…
Patience, Risk-Taking, and Human Capital Investment Across Countries
Patience and risk-taking—two preference components that steer intertemporal decision-making—are fundamental to human capital investment decisions. To understand how they contribute to international skill differences, we combine Programme for International Student Assessment tests with the Global Preference Survey. We find that opposing effects of patience (positive) and risk-taking (negative) together account for two-thirds of the cross-country v…
What Do Cost Functions Tell Us About the Cost of an Adequate Education
Econometric cost functions have begun to appear in education adequacy cases with greater frequency. Cost functions are superficially attractive because they give the impression of objectivity, holding out the promise of scientifically estimating the cost of achieving specified levels of performance from actual data on spending. By contrast, the opinions of educators form the basis of the most common approach to estimating the cost of adequacy, th…
Testing, Accountability, and the American Economy
Recent research highlights the importance of academic achievement as a determinant of economic well-being. Individual earnings, income growth in states, and national growth rates for GDP are each significantly determined by the population's cognitive skills, which in turn are proxied by scores on standardized achievement tests. This well-documented relationship between education and economic outcomes underscores the importance of using test infor…
Opportunities, race, and urban location: The influence of John Kain
Causes and Consequences of Grade Repetition: Evidence from Brazil
Formula budgeting: The economics and analytics of fiscal policy under rules
The dramatic change in aggregate fiscal policy in recent years has contributed to a shift from process rules to allocation rules in federal budgeting. Although the allocation rules inherent in formula budgeting seem to offer fairness in times of fiscal constraint, they actually impose arbitrary program‐level budgets that reflect the peculiarities of baselines, accounting conventions, and time horizons. Formula budgeting also changes the analytica…
Global universal basic skills: Current deficits and implications for world development
The Quality and Distribution of Teachers under the No Child Left Behind Act
The main effects of No Child Left Behind on the quality of teaching are likely to come through two provisions of the act. First, NCLB establishes benchmarks based on test score pass rates that schools must meet in order to remain in good standing and avoid sanctions. Since teachers are central to student performance, this accountability component of NCLB is likely to have direct effects on both the demand for and supply of teachers and therefore …
Why the federal governmentshould be involved in school accountability
What if there are no ‘best practices’
Developing persuasive and consistent models of educational performance has proved elusive. Existing modelling suggests no clear relationship between resources and student performance. This mirrors observed policy outcomes. A possible explanation is that the achievement process is a complicated interactive one such that simple linear additive formulations break down. This analysis presents a stylized model of achievement where unmeasured teacher q…
Regional Differences in the Structure of Earnings
T HERE have been a number of attempts to estimate the relationship between schooling and earnings of individuals, but the most common feature of these studies has been severe data limitation which, in turn, has dictated how the analysis could proceed. Perhaps the most serious restriction imposed by the data has been the assumption that earnings relationships are the same across the nation or, at least, across very sizable aggregations of states. …
The volunteer military and the rest of the iceberg
The Dynamics of Postwar Industrial Location
T HE location of industrial employment is a critical factor in virtually all models of urban spatial structure. However, most theoretical and empirical models of the urban economy say little about the determinants of industrial location. In the extreme, all employment is assumed to be centrally located (e.g., Muth, 1969, or Mills and Mackinnon, 1973), but, even when this assumption is relaxed as in transportation and land use studies (see Brown e…
Statistical Concepts and Methods
Conceptual and Empirical Issues in the Estimation of Educational Production Functions
Measuring educational performance and understanding its determinants are important for designing policies with respect to such varying issues as teacher accountability, educational finance systems, and school integration. Unfortunately, past analyses of student achievement and educational production relationships have been plagued by both a lack of conceptual clarity and a number of potentially severe analytical problems. As a result, there is co…
The dynamics of the housing market: A stock adjustment model of housing consumption
What is the Price Elasticity of Housing Demand
DISAGREEMENT about the responsiveness of housing demand to variations in relative prices persists, despite extensive empirical analyses. Two factors underlie this disagreement: the multidimensional character of housing makes direct observation of prices (as distinct from expenditures) impossible; and, the significant search, transactions, and moving costs associated with changing dwellings imply that, at any instant, a given household's consumpti…
Throwing Money at Schools
The conventional wisdom about public schools is that they face serious problems in terms of performance and that improving schools requires additional money. However, the available evidence suggests that there is no relationship between expenditures and the achievement of students and that such traditional remedies as reducing class sizes or hiring better trained teachers are unlikely to improve matters. Furthermore, there is little reason to bel…
The Continuing Hope: A Rejoinder
The most persuasive critique of my conclusion that variations in school resources are not related systematically to students' would be evidence to the contrary. But none is offered by Spencer and Wiley, and none is to be found. The main substantive argument in their article relates to the possibility that schools or teachers pursue different goals. They argue that measures of that do not reflect differences in goals might be misleading. School re…
Sources of black-white earnings differences
Formula budgeting: The economics and analytics of fiscal policy under rules
The dramatic change in aggregate fiscal policy in recent years has contributed to a shift from process rules to allocation rules in federal budgeting. Although the allocation rules inherent in formula budgeting seem to offer fairness in times of fiscal constraint, they actually impose arbitrary program‐level budgets that reflect the peculiarities of baselines, accounting conventions, and time horizons. Formula budgeting also changes the analytica…
Improving Educational Efficiency in Developing Countries: What do we know?[1]
[1] The World Bank does not accept responsibility for the views expressed herein, which are those of the author(s) and should not be attributed to the World Bank or its affiliated organisations. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions are the results of research or analysis supported by the Bank; they do not necessarily represent official policy of the Bank
Background Material and Data on Programs within the Jurisdiction of the Committee on Ways and Means, 1989 Edition
Hanushek Responds
The Impact of Differential Expenditures on School Performance
Two decades of research into educational production functions have produced startlingly consistent results: Variations in school expenditures are not systematically related to variations in student performance. Enormous differences in teacher quality exist, but differences in teacher skill are not strongly related to educational backgrounds, amount of teaching experience, or teaching in small classes. Further, more skilled teachers simply are not…
The Policy Research Markets
Part of the gle holding together the membership of the Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management is a concern about the character and path of public policies. Embedded in this is the professional opinion that analysis will improve the outcomes of deliberations. This issue-the relationship between analysis and development-has been the subject of a long-standing debate that has recently been revived. On the positive side is a simple fact…
The Trade-off between Child Quantity and Quality
An empirical investigation of trade-offs between number of children and their scholastic performance confirms that family size directly affects children's achievement. Though parents show no favoritism to first-born children, being early in the birth order implies a distinct advantage, entirely because of the higher probability of being in a small family. Recent large changes in family size explain a portion of aggregate test score declines, but …
An Exchange: Part II: Money Might Matter Somewhere: A Response to Hedges, Laine, and Greenwald
Money Might Matter Somewhere: A Response to Hedges, Laine, and Greenwald
Over the past quarter century, there has been an attempt to use systematic statistical analysis to inform educational policy. This analysis has not been greeted enthusiastically by educators, particularly because it has clearly indicated that their current operations are inefficient and broadly ineffective (Hanushek, 1989). The recent analysis of Larry Hedges, Richard Laine, and Rob Greenwald (1994) addresses the overall conclusions in my article…
Causes and Consequences of Grade Repetition: Evidence from Brazil
Interpreting Recent Research on Schooling in Developing Countries
Policymakers in developing countries have long been troubled by the undesirable, but apparently unavoidable, choice between providing broad access to education and developing high-quality schools. Recent evidence, however, suggests that this is a bad way to think about human capital development. Grade repetition and high dropout rates lead to a significant waste of resources in many school systems. Students in quality schools, however, respond in…
Modern Political Economy: Old Topics, New Directions
Political economy has been an essential realm of inquiry and has attracted myriad intellectual adherents for much of the period of modern scholarship. The discipline's formal split into the distinct studies of political science and economics in the nineteenth-century, while advantageous for certain scientific developments, has biased the way economists and political scientists think about many issues, and has placed artificial constraints on the …
Aggregation and the Estimated Effects of School Resources
This paper attempts to reconcile the contradictory findings in the debate over school resources and school effectiveness by highlighting the role of aggregation in the presence of omitted variables bias. While data aggregation for well-specified linear models yields unbiased parameter estimates, aggregation alters the magnitude of any omitted variables bias. In general, the theoretical impact of aggregation is ambiguous. In a very relevant specia…
Measuring Investment in Education
Historic debates about the measurement of capital are even more complicated in the case of education and human capital. As extensive research demonstrates, education resources are not consistently related to student performance in existing elementary and secondary schools. This inefficiency in public schools implies that spending and resource measures do not accurately capture variations in school quality. This finding then has clear implications…
Assessing the Effects of School Resources on Student Performance: An Update
The relationship between school resources and student achievement has been controversial, in large part because it calls into question a variety of traditional policy approaches. This article reviews the available educational production literature, updating previous summaries. The close to 400 studies of student achievement demonstrate that there is not a strong or consistent relationship between student performance and school resources, at least…
Economics (56 works) · School Choice and Performance (47 works) · Political science (33 works) · Psychology (32 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Higher Education Research Studies (20 works) · Mathematics education (20 works) · Economic growth (19 works) · Econometrics (18 works) · Academic achievement (14 works)