Ricardo Colaço, a researcher at the Nova SBE Economics of Education Knowledge Center, defended his PhD thesis today, entitled "Essays in Economics of Education: School Quality and Teacher Preferences". 

This thesis consists of three chapters that contribute to the debate on school quality and teachers’ decision-making:

Chapter 1, "Measuring School Quality in Portugal: Drift, Bias and Heterogeneity by Baseline Achievement" uses administrative data to calculate value-added for Portuguese schools, and to investigate heterogeneity in value-added by levels of baseline achievement.

Chapter 2, "The Role of Management Practices on Educational Outcomes in Vietnam" uses field data from Vietnam to study whether management practices relate to a broad set of educational outcomes, and to decompose the attenuation of the effect by different covariate groups.

Chapter 3, "Teacher Mobility to High-Cost Urban Areas", uses a discrete-choice experiment in Portugal to quantify the willingness of teachers to accept relocation to another region, and to estimate the cost of attracting teachers to a high-cost urban area under alternative wage schedules.

The dissertation will soon be available on the website.