Person:
Wößmann, Ludger
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Economics of education; economic growth; economics of innovation; economic history
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Ifo Center for the Economics of Education and Innovation
Externally Hosted Work
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Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Dr. Ludger Woessmann is Director of the Ifo Center for the Economics of Education and Innovation, in Munich, and Professor of Economics at the University of Munich.
Publication Search Results
1 - 2 of 2
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Publication
The Role of Education Quality for Economic Growth
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-02)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, focusing 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-are powerfully related to individual earnings, to the distribution of income, and to economic growth. New empirical results show the importance of both minimal and high-level skills, the complementarity of skills and the quality of economic institutions, and the robustness of the relationship between skills and growth. International comparisons incorporating expanded data on cognitive skills reveal much larger skill deficits in developing countries than generally derived from just school enrollment and attainment. The magnitude of change needed makes it clear that closing the economic gap with industrial countries will require major structural changes in schooling institutions. -
Publication
Families, Schools, and Primary-School Learning : Evidence for Argentina and Colombia in an International Perspective
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-03)This paper estimates the relationship between family background, school characteristics, and student achievement in primary school in two Latin American countries, Argentina and Colombia, as well as several comparison countries. The database used is the student-level international achievement data of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), which tested the reading performance of fourth-grade students in 2001. The nationally representative samples have 3,300 students in Argentina and 5,131 students in Colombia. The emerging general pattern of results is that educational performance is strongly related to students' family background, weakly to some institutional school features, and hardly to schools' resource endowments. In an international perspective, estimated family background effects are relatively large in Argentina, and relatively small in Colombia. A specific Argentine feature is the lack of performance differences between rural and urban areas. A specific Colombian feature is the lack of significant differences between gender performance. Nonnative students and students not speaking Spanish at home have particularly weak performance in both countries. But there are no differences by parental occupation and no positive effects of kindergarten attendance. In Argentina, students perform better in schools with a centralized curriculum and ability-based class formation.