STEP UP: What Works in Education?
About
The 2024 STEP UP “What Works in Education?” Conference highlighted new research at the intersection of education, labour markets and public policy, bringing together internationally recognised scholars to discuss how rigorous evidence could improve educational opportunity throughout the life course.
The program explored how education shaped long-term economic outcomes, with research on mathematics and career choices, skills mismatch in labour markets, family background and returns to higher education, early childhood development, effective classroom instruction, peer role models, and policies to improve gender equity in STEM. The conference concluded with a keynote address by Professor Victor Lavy (University of Warwick and Hebrew University of Jerusalem) on the role of school leadership and management in improving educational outcomes.
Keynote
Prof. Victor Lavy is the William Haber Chaired Professor of Economics at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Chaired Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and an M.A. in economics from University of Chicago where he also continued his academic career with a Ph.D. in economics.
His research spans labour economics, the economics of education, and development economics, with a special focus on studying the determinants of student achievement and the evaluation of means to increase student achievement, including financial incentives for teachers and students, peer effects related to gender or ability, the quantity-quality trade-off for children, and immigration, and more.
Prof. Lavy is one of the most prominent education economists in the world. He has published in leading economics journals including all the top-5 journals in Economics, being in the top 2% of most cited economists worldwide. He is also a Board Member of the Bureau for Research in the Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and Research Fellow of Centre for Economics and Policy Research (CEPR), of Centre for Economics Performance (CEP), of Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), and of International Growth Centre (IGC).
In his keynote School Management Takeovers, Leadership Change, and Personnel Policy, he will explore how school management takeovers lead to profound changes in the teaching body and the school personnel policy that subsequently improve student performance. Read more here.
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