DPhil student Noam Angrist co-authored a working paper Global data set on education quality (1965-2015) for the World Bank. Other authors are Nadir Altinok, Harry Anthony Patrinos.  

The paper presents the largest globally comparable panel database of education quality which can be used to benchmark global progress on education quality, as well as to uncover potential drivers of education quality, growth, and development. The analysis reveals trends such as learning outcomes in developing countries are often clustered at the bottom of the global scale; although variation in performance is high in developing countries, the top performers still often perform worse than the bottom performers in developed countries; gender gaps are relatively small, with high variation in the direction of the gap; and distributions reveal meaningfully different trends than mean scores, with less than 50 percent of students reaching the global minimum threshold of proficiency in developing countries relative to 86 percent in developed countries. The paper also finds a positive and significant association between educational achievement and economic growth.