Essays in economics of education and econometric theory

This doctoral thesis is composed of three chapters on economics of education
and econometric theory. Chapter 2 studies how students interact in teams
and gives some guidance to educators how to group students to increase their
academic knowledge obtained from teamwork. Chapter 3 provides some initial
analysis which will be used in future research to investigate whether teachers’
subjective assessments are driven by superior information about pupils or
by their biases and mistaken beliefs. It is important to disentangle these two
forms of teacher discretion, because they have different policy implications.
If teacher discretion stems from their biases or mistaken beliefs, educational
institutions may want to minimize the reliance on teachers’ assessments. On
the other hand, if teachers take into account abilities not captured by the
standardized test, educational institutions may prefer to give more weight
to their assessments. Chapter 4 proposes a new estimator for spatial sample
selection models.