Job Market

Peter Courtney

On the 2026–27 academic job market

Peter Courtney

PhD candidate in economics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Stellenbosch University, expected July 2027.

Primary fields development economics, economics of education
Secondary field economic history

[email protected]

Job market paper

Making School-Set Marks Comparable: Test Difficulty and Hidden Learning Inequality

Assessment has been found to raise learning system-wide where its results can be compared across schools, yet at most a quarter of countries test every primary student comparably. I recover a common scale of learning outcomes—without a new test—from marks that are incomparable because assessments are more difficult at some schools than at others. Each secondary school sets the same assessments for students from many primary schools within months of arrival, allowing comparison of those primary schools’ marks. Primary schools feed many secondary schools, enabling a two-way fixed-effects estimator to chain this network of comparisons across 1.2 million South African students into a common scale. The gap between rich and poor schools halved on raw marks between 2018 and 2022 but did not narrow on the common scale. Compared with raw marks, about three-quarters of primary schools move to a different quintile of learning. Five years after primary school, the common scale predicts the national school-leaving examination better than raw marks. Easier assessments do not buy a higher-achieving secondary school: at the same raw mark, students whose primary school set easier assessments join lower-achieving classmates. The common scale supplies comparable intake marks, a necessary condition for any value-added measure.

Paper Online appendix Appendix in the browser

This version 22 October 2026 · 53 pages

Application materials

Curriculum vitae

Education, papers, talks, teaching and references, on two pages or one.

PDF · 22 October 2026

2 pages 1 page

Cover letter

The one-page letter that goes with each application.

PDF · 1 page · 22 October 2026

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Research statement

What ties the three thesis papers together, and the two projects that come next.

PDF · 2 pages · 22 October 2026

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Teaching statement

Teaching and supervision so far, how I teach, and the courses I can teach.

PDF · 1 page · 22 October 2026

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Dissertation abstract

The three essays of the thesis on one page.

PDF · 1 page · 22 October 2026

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Other thesis papers

Provision Meets Deployment: What a Teacher Post Buys in South African Schools

About half of a formula-owed teacher post reaches class size (IV). With the teachers they already have, schools could cut the class the average student sits in by up to a fifth, from 43 to 35 students.

Invisible Borders, Living Institutions: How Apartheid’s Bantustans Still Shape Schooling

Crossing into the former KwaZulu homeland raises a child’s risk of repeating a grade, and crossing out lowers it, by roughly 10–13% (within-child movers design); schools inside pay 9.2% less per educator head on the same national pay scale.

Drafts available on request.