El principio básico que guió hasta finales de 2011 la actuación de las autoridades españolas frente a la crisis financiera no fue otro que reducir al máximo la carga soportada por los contribuyentes. Acorde con él, se descartó utilizar la solución que adoptaron un buen número de países, esto es recapitalizar masiva e inmediatamente con fondos públicos sus sistemas bancarios, optando en su lugar por exigir más provisiones y capital a las entidades con problemas, al tiempo que se incentivaba su fusión con otras más solventes.

La integración comercial interior de España recibió un gran impulso en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX. Anteriormente, las regiones eran economías relativamente independientes, debido a la presencia de barreras comerciales y a los altos costes de transporte. Durante el periodo entre 1860 y 1960 se consolida el mercado doméstico gracias a la liberalización comercial interior y a la finalización de la red nacional de ferrocarriles.

The relationship between socio-economic status and student achievement is well documented and a widespread literature indicates that students from more advantaged backgrounds perform better at school. Despite this relationship, several international assessments have highlighted that in each country there is a relevant proportion of “resilient students”, i.e. students who come from a disadvantaged socio-economic background but achieve relatively high levels of educational performance. In this paper, the determinants of resilience in the Italian educational system are investigated analysing data from the OECD-PISA 2009 edition, with a specific focus on the role of school-level variables that could help more students succeed. The aim is to target a specific category of resilient students, namely those who are characterised by a low socioeconomic background both at family level and at school level; therefore a novel statistical procedure is proposed to derive a sample of disadvantaged students who attend disadvantaged schools. Afterwards a multilevel logistic approach is adopted to determine which characteristics of students, families and schools, tend to give disadvantaged students a higher probability of becoming a resilient. Our results confirm that not only individual-level characteristics, but also some school factors (i.e. extracurricular activities and school leadership) play a role in this direction, suggesting policy and managerial implications.

Recent proposals would strengthen the dependence of teacher pay and retention on performance, in order to attract those who will be effective teachers and repel those who will not. I model the teacher labor market, incorporating dynamic self-selection, noisy performance measurement, and Bayesian learning. Simulations indicate that labor market interactions are important to the evaluation of alternative teacher contracts. Typical bonus policies have very small effects on selection. Firing policies can have larger effects, if accompanied by substantial salary increases. However, misalignment between productivity and measured performance nearly eliminates the benefits while preserving most of the costs.

The extensive use of foreign languages in schooling might have an important role to play in the poor educational outcomes observed on the African continent. Exploiting the language policy change of 1994 in Ethiopia as a natural experiment, we estimate the effects of provision of mother tongue instruction on the largest ethnic group in the country. Our results suggest that provision of mother tongue education led to an increase of 0.75 to 1 year of primary schooling in the aected cohort. Moreover the entire increase in the years of schooling can be attributed to the intensive margin of education. The language policy change, conditional on enrolment, increased the percentage of people completing 6 years or more of schooling by 31%. Applying our findings to a set of African countries shows that even after accounting for the costs of provision, introduction of mother tongue instruction imply potentially large benefits and increases the percentage of population completing primary schooling by as much as 15% points. These finding have important policy implications at a time when surging enrolment rates and already stretched educational budgets in the African continent imply need for solutions which can increase the quality of education without requiring huge capital or infrastructural outlays.

We evaluate a program that introduced bilingual education in English and Spanish in primary education in some public schools of the Madrid region in 2004. Under this program students not only study English as a foreign language but also some subjects (at least Science, History and Geography) are taught in English. Spanish and Mathematics are taught only in Spanish. The first class receiving full treatment finished Primary education in June 2010 and they took the standardized test for all 6th grade students in Madrid on the skills considered \indispensable» at that age. This test is our measure of the outcome of primary education to evaluate the program. We have to face a double self-selection problem. One is caused by schools who decide to apply for the program, and a second one caused by students when choosing school. We take several routes to control for these selection problems. The main route to control for self- selected schools is to take advantage of the test being conducted in the same schools before and after the program was implemented in 6th grade. To control for students self-selection we combine the use of several observable characteristics (like parents’ education and occupation) with the fact that most students were already enrolled at the different schools before the program was announced. Our results indicate that there is a clear negative effect on learning the subject taught in English for children whose parents have less than upper secondary education, and no clear effect for anyone on mathematical and reading skills, which were taught in Spanish.