Title: Macroeconomic crises and cross-country achievement gap

Abstract: This paper studies the impact of economic crises during childhood on academic achievement across countries. Current literature focusses on the consequences of a specific economic crisis in one country on long-term educational attainment and labour market outcomes. This paper contributes to the study on economic shocks and human capital accumulation by extending to both global and country-specific crises and conducting a cross-country comparison. Second, in order to fully describe the different experiences of crises by students, it analyses the impact of economic crises from four dimensions based on the length, number and age of exposure rather than the mere occurrence of the events. I use 2003-2015 PISA datasets for students’ demographics, family and school characteristics. The Global Crises Data by Harvard Business School is used to generate four measures for economic crises. Preliminary results show that total years of exposure is the most significant element that explains the achievement gap and the effect of the age of exposure is insignificant. Students of both genders have lower reading, mathematics and science test scores for longer exposure to crises, but females’ scores are 1.2-2.5 points lower than males’. Native and immigrant students suffer lower scores from longer period of crises experienced. While natives have smaller drop in reading score, their performances in mathematics and science are worse than immigrants.