Latest publications from

Student Awareness of Costs and Benefits of Educational Decisions: Effects of an Information Campaign

Marty McGuigan Sandra McNally Gill Wyness

CEEDP0139. August 2012.University fees have recently trebled in England and there are fears that many young people may be put off from participating in further and higher education – especially those from low income backgrounds. This could exacerbate inequalities that are already very stark in the UK. In this paper, we investigate students’ knowledge and their receptiveness to information campaigns about the costs and benefits of staying on in education. We design an ‘information campaign’ that gives some simple facts about economic and financial aspects of educational decisions and test students’ response to this campaign. The fieldwork for our information campaign took place over the period in which the trebling of university fees was announced. This was widely reported in the media, so we also test receptiveness to the surrounding media campaign. The analysis shows evidence of large gaps in students’ knowledge, which are influenced both by the information campaign and media reporting about the increase of tuition fees. However, the latter greatly increased the perception of going to university as ‘too expensive’ – especially among low income groups. Our experiment shows that simple information campaigns can help to mitigate this negative impact on attitudes.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp139.pdf

Do Professors Really Perpetuate the Gender Gap in Science? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in a French Higher Education Institution

Thomas Breda Son Thierry Ly

CEEDP0138. June 2012.Stereotypes, role models played by teachers and social norms influence girls’ academic self-concept and push girls to choose humanities rather than science. Do recruiters reinforce this strong selection by discriminating more against girls in more scientific subjects? Using the entrance exam of a French higher education institution (the Ecole Normale Supérieure) as a natural experiment, we show the opposite: discrimination goes in favor of females in more male-connoted subjects (e.g. math, philosophy) and in favor of males in more female-connoted subjects (e.g. literature, biology), inducing a rebalancing of sex ratios between students recruited for a research career in science and humanities majors. We identify discrimination by systematic differences in students’ scores between oral tests (non-blind toward gender) and anonymous written tests (blind toward gender). By making comparisons of these oral/written scores differences between different subjects for a given student, we are able to control both for a student’s ability in each subject and for her overall ability at oral exams. The mechanisms likely to drive this positive discrimination toward the minority gender are also discussed.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp138.pdf

Non-Native Speakers Of English In The Classroom: What Are The Effects On Pupil Performance?

Charlotte Geay Sandra McNally Shqiponja Telhaj

CEEDP0137. March 2012.In recent years there has been an increase in the number of children going to school in England who do not speak English as a first language. We investigate whether this has an impact on the educational outcomes of native English speakers at the end of primary school. We show that the negative correlation observed in the raw data is mainly an artefact of selection: non-native speakers are more likely to attend school with disadvantaged native speakers. We attempt to identify a causal impact of changes in the percentage of non-native speakers within the year group. In general, our results suggest zero effect and rule out negative effects.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp137.pdf

Mental Health and Education Decisions

Francesca Cornaglia Elena Crivellaro Sandra McNally

CEEEDP0136. February 2012.Mental health problems - and depression in particular - have been rising internationally. The link between poor mental health and poor educational outcomes is particularly interesting in the case of the UK which has a low international ranking both on measures of child wellbeing and the probability of early drop-out from the labour market and education. We study this issue using a large longitudinal study of a recent cohort of teenagers in England. We use the General Health Questionnaire to derive measures of poor mental health. We find a large negative association between mental health problems and educational outcomes - where we consider examination results before leaving compulsory education and the probability of being “not in education, employment or training” at a young age. The association is large even after including a very rich set of controls. Results are stronger for girls and also vary according to the different components of the mental health measure. We also explore the potential role of intermediary mechanisms (truancy and risky behaviours).

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp136.pdf

Subjective Performance Evaluation in the Public Sector: Evidence from School Inspections

Iftikhar Hussain

CEEDP0135. February 2012.Performance measurement in the public sector is largely based on objective metrics, which may be subject to gaming behaviour. This paper investigates a novel subjective performance evaluation system where independent inspectors visit schools at very short notice, publicly disclose their findings and sanction schools rated fail. First, I demonstrate that inspection ratings can aid in distinguishing between more and less effective schools, even after controlling for standard observed school characteristics. Second, exploiting a natural experiment, I show that a fail inspection leads to test score gains; at least some of these gains persist in the medium term. I find no evidence to suggest that fail schools are able to inflate test score performance by gaming the system. Oversight by inspectors may play an important role in mitigating such strategic behaviour.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp135.pdf

Fasting During Pregnancy and Children's Academic Performance

Douglas Almond Bhashkar Mazumder Reyn van Ewijk

CEEDP0134. January 2012.We consider the effects of daytime fasting by pregnant women during the lunar month of Ramadan on their children's test scores at age seven. Using English register data, we find that scores are .05 to .08 standard deviations lower for Pakistani and Bangladeshi students exposed to Ramadan in early pregnancy. These estimates are downward biased to the extent that Ramadan is not universally observed. We conclude that the effects of prenatal investments on test scores are comparable to many conventional educational interventions but are likely to be more cost effective and less subject to “fade out”.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp134.pdf

Students’ Perceptions of Teacher Biases: Experimental Economics in Schools

Amine Ouazad Lionel Page

CEEDP0133. January 2012.We put forward a new experimental economics design with monetary incentives to estimate students’ perceptions of grading discrimination. We use this design in a large field experiment which involved 1,200 British students in grade 8 classrooms across 29 schools. In this design, students are given an endowment they can invest on a task where payoff depends on performance. The task is a written verbal test which is graded non anonymously by their teacher, in a random half of the classrooms, and graded anonymously by an external examiner in the other random half of the classrooms. We find significant evidence that students’ choices reflect perceptions of biases in teachers’ grading practices. Our results show systematic gender interaction effects: male students invest less with female teachers than with male teachers while female students invest more with male teachers than with female teachers. Interestingly, female students’ perceptions are not in line with actual discrimination: Teachers tend to give better grades to students of their own gender. Results do not suggest that ethnicity and socioeconomic status play a role.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp133.pdf

Valuing School Quality Using Boundary Discontinuities

Stephen Gibbons Stephen Machin Olmo Silva

CEEDP0132. January 2012.Existing research shows that house prices respond to local school quality as measured by average test scores. However, higher test scores could signal better quality teaching and academic value-added, or higher ability, sought-after intakes. In our research, we show decisively that value-added drives households’ demand for good schooling. However, prior achievement – linked to the background of children in school – also matters. In order to identify these effects, we improve the boundary discontinuity regression methodology by matching identical properties across admissions authority boundaries; by allowing for boundary effects and spatial trends; by re-weighting our data towards transactions that are closest to district boundaries; by eliminating boundaries that coincide with major geographical features; and by submitting our estimates to a number of novel falsification tests. Our results survive this battery of experiments and show that a one-standard deviation change in either school average value-added or prior achievement raises prices by around 3%.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp132.pdf

The Evaluation of English Education Policies

Stephen Machin Sandra McNally

CEEDP0131. December 2011.Educational inequalities are evident even before children start school. Those connected to disadvantage widen out as children progress through the education system and into the labour market. We document various forms of educational inequality. We then review available evidence for England about the impact of school-level policies on achievement and their potential for reducing the socio-economic gap. We discuss evaluation evidence under four main themes: school resources; market incentives; school autonomy; and pedagogical approaches.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp131.pdf

Do Public Colleges in Developing Countries Provide Better Education than Private ones? Evidence from General Education Sector in India

Yona Rubinstein Sheetal Sekhri

CEEDP0130. December 2011.Public college graduates in many developing countries outperform graduates of private ones on the college exit exams. This has often been attributed to the cutting edge education provided in public colleges. However, public colleges are highly subsidized, suggesting that the private-public education outcome gap might reflect the pre-determined quality of the students who sort into public colleges rather than the causal impact of the public tertiary education on students’ outcomes. We evaluate the impact of public colleges using a newly assembled unique data set that links admission data with the educational outcomes on a set of common exit exams in India. Admission to general education public colleges is strictly based on the results of the Senior Secondary School examinations. We exploit this feature in a Regression Discontinuity Design, and find that the public colleges have no added value in the neighborhood of the admission cut off scores.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp130.pdf

An Evaluation of “Special Educational Needs” Programmes in England

Francois Keslair Eric Maurin Sandra McNally

CEEDP0129. November 2011.The need for education to help every child rather than focus on average attainment has become a more central part of the policy agenda in the US and the UK. Remedial programmes are often difficult to evaluate because participation is usually based on pupil characteristics that are largely unobservable to the analyst. In this paper we evaluate programmes for children with moderate levels of ‘special educational needs’ in England. We show that the decentralized design of the policy generates significant variations in access to remediation resources across children with similar prior levels of difficulty. However, this differential is not reflected in subsequent educational attainment – suggesting that the programme is ineffective for ‘treated’ children. In the second part of our analysis, we use demographic variation within schools to consider the effect of the programme on whole year groups. Our analysis is consistent with no overall effect on account of the combined direct and indirect (spillover) effects. Thus, the analysis suggests that a key way that English education purports to help children with learning difficulties is not working.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp129.pdf

Does Additional Spending Help Urban Schools? An Evaluation Using Boundary Discontinuities

Stephen Gibbons Sandra McNally Martina Viarengo

CEEDP0128. September 2011.Improvement of educational attainment in schools in urban, disadvantaged areas is an important priority for policy – particularly in countries like England which have a long tail at the bottom of the educational distribution and where there is much concern about low social mobility. An anomaly in the spatial dimension of school funding policy in England allows us to examine the effect of increasing school expenditure for schools in urban areas. This anomaly arises because an ‘area cost adjustment’ is made in how central government allocates funds to Local Authorities (school districts) whereas, in reality, teachers are drawn from the same labour market and are paid according to national pay scales. This is one of the features that give rise to neighbouring schools on either side of a Local Authority boundary being allocated very different resources, even if they have very similar characteristics. We find that these funding disparities give rise to sizeable differences in pupil attainment in national tests at the end of primary school. This finding lends adds to the evidence that school resources have an important role to play in improving educational attainment and has direct policy implications for the current ‘pupil premium’ policy in England.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp128.pdf

From Grants to Loans and Fees: The Demand for Post-Compulsory Education in England and Wales from 1955 to 2008

Peter Dolton Li Lin

CEEDP0127. September 2011.The UK has progressively moved from a Higher Education (HE) system which is funded at the tax payers’ expense to one which is funded by individual participants (and their parents) by scrapping student grants, introducing student loans and charging tuition fees. The purpose of this paper is to identify the impact of these changes on the demand for HE using time-series data for England and Wales over the period 1955 to 2008. We use a Seemingly Unrelated Regressions model of three indicators of demand for post-compulsory education allowing for structural breaks. Tests show that most of the breaks occurred in line with several important policy changes. We find that less generous student financial support arrangements have had a significant negative impact on university enrolment. We simulate the impact of raising tuition fees to £9,000 pa and find that this will reduce demand for HE from boys by 7.51 percentage points and from girls by 4.92 percentage points.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp127.pdf

The Impact of Tuition Fees and Support on University Participation in the UK

Lorraine Dearden Emla Fitzsimons Gill Wyness

CEEDP0126. July 2011.Understanding how policy can affect university participation is important for understanding how governments can promote human capital accumulation. In this paper, we estimate the separate impacts of tuition fees and maintenance grants on the decision to enter university in the UK. We use Labour Force Survey data covering 1992–2007, a period of important variation in higher education finance, which saw the introduction of up-front tuition fees and the abolition of maintenance grants in 1998, followed some eight years later by a shift to higher deferred fees and the reinstatement of maintenance grants. We create a pseudo-panel of university participation of cohorts defined by sex, region of residence and family background, and estimate a number of different specifications on these aggregated data. Our findings show that tuition fees have had a significant negative effect on participation, with a £1,000 increase in fees resulting in a decrease in participation of 3.9 percentage points, which equates to an elasticity of –0.14. Non-repayable support in the form of maintenance grants has had a positive effect on participation, with a £1,000 increase in grants resulting in a 2.6 percentage point increase in participation, which equates to an elasticity of 0.18. These findings are comparable to, but of a slightly lower magnitude than, those in the related US literature.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp126.pdf

Are England’s Academies More Inclusive or More ‘Exclusive’? The Impact of Institutional Change on the Pupil Profile of Schools

Joan Wilson

CEEDP0125. May 2011.In 2002 the former Labour government launched the Academies Programme of school improvement. This scheme has targeted entrenched issues of pupil underachievement within state secondary schools located in deprived areas, by enabling private sponsors to run the renewed schools and by granting Academies independence from local authority control. A total of 203 institutions were established by the end of Labour’s time in power (April 2010). This paper considers the efficacy of the scheme in delivering on an objective determined at its inception – that requiring Academies to feature a more inclusive and mixed-ability background of pupils. Administrative information in the National Pupil Database is combined with school-level data to assess how the academic quality and composition of pupils entering year 7 of Academies and how their whole school composition has compared to those in predecessor and non-Academy schools. Difference-in-differences regression analysis is applied to a sample of 33 Academies and 326 control schools over the period 1997-2007. Findings reveal an immediate boost to intake quality among Academies once the policy came into effect and a fall in entry by pupils of weaker prior ability, while sampled Academies have also taken in fewer pupils from underprivileged backgrounds. Thus Academies have actually featured a more ‘exclusive’ pupil profile. The Coalition government – formed since May 2010 – has extended the policy to allow all state schools to become Academies. Newer Academies, like the original ones, may adapt their admissions in a performance-favouring way, implying a worsening of educational opportunity under both policy versions.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp125.pdf

Post-16 Educational Choices and Institutional Value Added at Key Stage 5

Claire Crawford Elena Meschi Anna Vignoles

CEEDP0124. April 2011.Childcare costs are often viewed as one of the biggest barriers to work, particularly among lone parents on low incomes. Children in England are eligible to attend free part-time nursery classes (equivalent to pre-kindergarten) from the academic term after they turn 3, and are typically eligible to start free full-time public education on 1 September after they turn four. These rules mean that children born one day apart may start nursery classes up to four months apart, and may start school up to one year apart. We exploit these discontinuities to investigate the impact of a youngest child being eligible for part-time nursery education and full-time primary education on welfare receipt and employment patterns amongst lone parents receiving welfare. In contrast to previous studies, we are able to estimate the precise timing (relative to the date on which part-time or full-time education begins) of any impact on labour supply, by using rich administrative data. Amongst those receiving welfare when their youngest child is aged approximately three and a half, we find a small but significant effect of free full-time public education on both employment and welfare receipt (of around 2 percentage points, or 10-15 per cent), which peaks eight to nine months after the child becomes eligible (aged approximately 4 years and 9 months). We find weaker evidence of an even smaller effect of eligibility for part-time nursery education. This suggests that the expansion of public education programmes to younger disadvantaged children may only encourage a small number of low income lone parents to return to work (although, of course, this is not the primary aim of such programmes).

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp124.pdf

Changing School Autonomy: Academy Schools and their Introduction to England's Education

Stephen Machin James Vernoit

CEEDP0123. April 2011.In this paper, we study a high profile case - the introduction of academy schools into the English secondary school sector - that has allowed schools to gain more autonomy and flexible governance by changing their school structure. We consider the impact of an academy school conversion on their pupil intake and pupil performance and possible external effects working through changes in the pupil intake and pupil performance of neighbouring schools. These lines of enquiry are considered over the school years 2001-02 to 2008-09. We bypass the selection bias inherent in previous evaluations of academy schools by comparing the outcomes of interest in academy schools to a specific group of comparison schools, namely those state-maintained schools that go on to become academies after our sample period ends. This approach allows us to produce a well-balanced treatment and control group. Our results suggest that moving to a more autonomous school structure through academy conversion generates a significant improvement in the quality of their pupil intake and a significant improvement in pupil performance. We also find significant external effects on the pupil intake and the pupil performance of neighbouring schools. All of these results are strongest for the schools that have been academies for longer and for those who experienced the largest increase in their school autonomy. In essence, the results paint a (relatively) positive picture of the academy schools that were introduced by the Labour government of 1997-2010. The caveat is that such benefits have, at least for the schools we consider, taken a while to materialise.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp123.pdf

Do Neighbours Affect Teenage Outcomes? Evidence from Neighbourhood Changes in England

Stephen Gibbons Olmo Silva Felix Weinhardt

CEEDP0122. November 2010.In this paper, we use census data on several cohorts of secondary school students in England matched to detailed information on place of residence to investigate the effect of neighbours’ background characteristics and prior achievements on teenagers’ educational and behavioural outcomes. Our analysis focuses on the age-11 to age-16 time-lapse, and uses variation in neighbourhood composition over this period that is driven by residential mobility. Exploiting the longitudinal nature and detail of our data, we are able to control for pupil unobserved characteristics, neighbourhood fixed-effects and time-trends, school-by-cohort unobservables, as well as students’ observable attributes and prior attainments. Our results provide little evidence that neighbours’ characteristics significantly affect pupil test score progression during secondary education. Similarly, we find that neighbourhood composition only exerts a small effect on pupil behavioural outcomes, such as general attitudes towards schooling, substance use and anti-social behaviour.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp122.pdf

Starting School And Leaving Welfare: The Impact of Public Education on Lone Parents' Welfare Receipt

Mike Brewer Claire Crawford

CEEDP0121. October 2010.Childcare costs are often viewed as one of the biggest barriers to work, particularly among lone parents on low incomes. Children in England are eligible to attend free part-time nursery classes (equivalent to pre-kindergarten) from the academic term after they turn 3, and are typically eligible to start free full-time public education on 1 September after they turn four. These rules mean that children born one day apart may start nursery classes up to four months apart, and may start school up to one year apart. We exploit these discontinuities to investigate the impact of a youngest child being eligible for part-time nursery education and full-time primary education on welfare receipt and employment patterns amongst lone parents receiving welfare. In contrast to previous studies, we are able to estimate the precise timing (relative to the date on which part-time or full-time education begins) of any impact on labour supply, by using rich administrative data. Amongst those receiving welfare when their youngest child is aged approximately three and a half, we find a small but significant effect of free full-time public education on both employment and welfare receipt (of around 2 percentage points, or 10-15 per cent), which peaks eight to nine months after the child becomes eligible (aged approximately 4 years and 9 months). We find weaker evidence of an even smaller effect of eligibility for part-time nursery education. This suggests that the expansion of public education programmes to younger disadvantaged children may only encourage a small number of low income lone parents to return to work (although, of course, this is not the primary aim of such programmes).

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp121.pdf

The Timing of Parental Income and Child Outcomes: The Role of Permanent and Transitory Shocks

Emma Tominey

CEEDP0120. October 2010.How do shocks to parental income drive adolescent human capital, including years of schooling, high school dropout, university attendance, IQ and health? A structural model decomposes household shocks into permanent and transitory components, then the effect of shocks at age 1-16 is estimated for 600,000 Norwegian children. The effect of permanent shocks declines - and of transitory shocks is small and constant across child age, suggesting parents optimise similarly to consumption. However there is a lower effect of transitory shocks for liquidity constrained parents. An interpretation is that these parents use income shocks for essential consumption rather than investment.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp120.pdf

When do Better Schools Raise Housing Prices? Evidence from Paris Public and Private Schools

Gabrielle Fack Julien Grenet

CEEDP0119. October 2010.In this paper, we investigate how housing prices react to the quality of education offered by neighbouring public and private schools. The organization of secondary schooling in the city of Paris, which combines residence-based-assignment to public schools with a well-developed and almost entirely publicly funded private school system, offers a valuable empirical context for analyzing how private schools affect the capitalization of public school performance in housing prices. Using comprehensive data on both schools and real estate transact ions over the period 1997-2004, we develop a matching framework to carefully compare sales across school attendance boundaries. We find that a standard deviation increase in public school performance raises housing prices by 1.4 to 2.4%. Moreover, we show that the capitalization of public school performance in the price of real estate shrinks as the availability of private schools increases in the neighbourhood. Our results confirm the predictions of general equilibrium models of school choice that private schools, by providing an advantageous outside option to parents, tend to mitigate the impact of public school performance on housing prices.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp119.pdf

Do Differences in School's Instruction Time Explain International Achievement Gaps in Maths, Science and Language? Evidence from Developed and Developing Countries

Victor Lavy

CEEDP0118. October 2010.There are large differences across countries in instructional time in schooling institutions. Can these differences explain some of the differences across countries in pupils’ achievements in different subjects? What is the likely impact of changes in instructional time? While research in recent years provides convincing evidence about the effect of several inputs in the education production function, there is limited evidence on the effect of classroom instructional time. Such evidence is of policy relevance in many countries, and it became very concrete recently as President Barrack Obama announced the goal of extending the school week and year as a central objective in his proposed education reform for the US. In this paper, I estimate the effects of instructional time on students’ academic achievement in math, science and language. I estimate linear and non-linear instructional time effects controlling for unobserved heterogeneity of both pupils and schools. The evidence from a sample of 15 year olds from over fifty countries that participated in PISA 2006 consistently shows that instructional time has a positive and significant effect on test scores. The effect is large relative to the standard deviation of the within pupil test score distribution. The OLS results are highly biased upward but the within student estimates are very similar across groups of developed and middle-income countries. However, the estimated effect of instructional time in the sample of developing countries is much lower than the effect size in the developed countries. Several checks for threats of identification support the causal interpretation of this evidence. I obtain very similar results when I use as an alternative data from primary and middle schools in Israel and a somewhat different identification strategy. Finally, I also explore some correlations that suggest that suggest that the productivity of instructional time is higher in countries that implemented s

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp118.pdf

Research on the Intergenerational Links in the Every Child Matters Outcomes.Report to the Department of Children, Schools and Families

Jo Blanden Stephen Machin Richard Murphy Emma Tominey

CEESP05. August 2010.The Every Child Matters (ECM) agenda was introduced in the UK, as a policy aiming to improve child outcomes along five broad areas. The categories are Be Healthy, Stay Safe, Enjoy and Achieve, Make a Positive Contribution and Achieve Economic Wellbeing1. The objective therefore, is to move beyond the traditional focus on child academic outcomes, to improve the wellbeing of children in the UK. From a policy perspective, there is a need to understand the mechanism through which the wide range of child ECM outcomes form. This report evaluates the role of families in driving the ECM outcomes of their children. Specifically, we analyse the intergenerational transmission of ECM outcomes between parents and children. We take the approach of analysing correlations across generations in a wide set of outcomes - the broadest set of variables studied to date. Existing studies of intergenerational correlations across generations tend to focus on outcomes such as earnings, and consequently very little is known about how healthiness, safety and enjoyment of school are correlated across generations. We contribute towards this literature by extending the scope of child outcomes. This research was commissioned before the new UK Government took office on 11 May 2010. As a result the content may not reflect current Government policy and may make reference to the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) which has now been replaced by the Department for Education (DfE). The views expressed in this report are those of the authors' and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department for Education.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceesp05.pdf

The Determinants of Non-Cognitive and Cognitive Schooling Outcomes. Report to the Department of Children, Schools and Families

Elena Meschi Anna Vignoles

CEESP04. August 2010.The Centre for the Economics of Education was asked to investigate the factors that influence a range of children's academic and non-academic outcomes, including their enjoyment of school, whether they take unauthorised absence from school and whether they feel they are bullied. The study also investigated whether schools can influence these non-academic outcomes. The study makes use of the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, which is a survey of young people in secondary school that collects information on bullying, truancy and many other factors in each child's life. The data is linked to information on each child's academic achievement, enabling this study to investigate the inter-relationship between a pupil's academic performance and non academic outcomes. Pupils who enjoy school more at age 14 have, perhaps unsurprisingly, higher academic achievement by age 16. Equally, children who have higher achievement at age 11 go on to enjoy school more at age 16 though this is a not a strong relationship. In other words enjoyment of school and academic achievement are clearly linked. Pupils who were bullied or who took unauthorised absence at age 14 had significantly lower educational achievement at GCSE. Pupils who experienced bullying at age 14 were also much more likely to experience bullying at age 16. Therefore early negative outcomes, such as being bullied, suggest the child is at risk of having later negative experiences at age 16. Conversely, pupils who participate in positive extra-curricular activities, such as clubs, were also found to have better academic achievement later in their schooling. High achievers at school, i.e. pupils who do well academically at age 14, were also no more likely to be bullied at age 16 than other children. The report also investigated the impact of schools on some of these non-academic outcomes between 14-16 and found little evidence that schools currently have different impacts on pupil's enjoyment of school, nor whether they take unauthorised absence, nor their likelihood of being bullied. In other words, which school a pupil attends is likely to have small or no effect on their wider well-being. This does not mean that schools do not have the potential to impact on these factors but rather that currently there are not large differences across schools in these outcomes once socio-economic factors have been taken into account. The report concludes that non-academic factors, such as a pupil's enjoyment of school, are inextricably linked to pupils' academic achievement. We need to be aware of these relationships when considering policies to improve pupil achievement. The report also provides some useful risk indicators of future low pupil academic achievement. For example, some factors, such as being bullied or taking unauthorised absence, predict low future academic achievement. Again this can be used by schools and policy-makers to identify pupils at risk of low attainment. This research report was written before the new UK Government took office on 11 May 2010. As a result the content may not reflect current Government policy. This research will be of use to officials and ministers in helping to shape the future direction of policy and Departmental strategy.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceesp04.pdf

The Interdependence and Determinants of Childhood Outcomes: The Relevance for Policy. Report to the Department of Children, Schools and Families

Bilal Nasim

CEESP03. August 2010.The Centre for the Economics of Education was asked to bring together a wide range of academic evidence (primarily England-based) to investigate the extent to which academic and non-academic childhood outcomes are complementary to each other, or are in some way traded-off against each other. The report also investigates the drivers of both academic and non-academic outcomes and the extent to which child outcomes persist throughout a child's life and across generations. There is also a brief discussion of the implications of this evidence to education policy. The report finds that the relationships between academic and non-academic outcomes are complex in nature. For example, pupils who are bullied or who take unauthorised absence at age 14 have significantly lower educational achievement at GCSE. Pupils who experienced bullying at age 14 were also much more likely to experience bullying at age 16. Conversely pupils who participate in positive extra-curricular activities, such as clubs, were also found to have better academic achievement later in their schooling. These childhood outcomes are themselves determined by a wide variety of influences (such as the quality of parenting they receive) and environmental factors (for example whether they are exposed to passive smoke). It has been well established that children from disadvantaged backgrounds have relatively poor academic outcomes and tend to have weaker social skills than children from more advantaged households. However the evidence also suggests that these children also go on to experience more negative outcomes in adulthood, such as lower probability of employment and lower wages. Furthermore key social and academic outcomes of parents - cognitive skills, attitudes to education, smoking and drinking - are related to similar behaviours in their children. The report concludes that the complex nature of the drivers of child development, the interdependence of child outcomes, and the way that outcomes persist through an individual's life and across generations needs to be recognised in order to develop truly effective policy.While very little of the evidence highlighted in this report identifies true causal relationships (i.e. that a factor X actually directly causes a change in outcome Y), the report draws on some of the highest quality research and analysis currently available, using detailed longitudinal datasets, including the Department's own Longitudinal Study of Young People in England. This enables us to identify at the very least 'robust associations' as well as the data allows. However it does suggest that further research is required to better understand the associations outlined in this report to move to a position where we can identify credible causal relationships. This is important to foster more justified and increasingly effective policymaking. This research report was written before the new UK Government took office on 11 May 2010. As a result the content may not reflect current Government policy. This research will be of use to officials and ministers in helping to shape the future direction of education policy and Departmental strategy.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceesp03.pdf

Variation in Educational Outcomes and Policies Across Countries and of Schools within Countries

Richard Freeman Stephen Machin Martina Viarengo

CEEDP0117. August 2010.This study examines the variation in educational outcomes across and within countries using the TIMSS mathematics tests. It documents the wide cross-country variation in the level and dispersion of test scores. Countries with the highest test scores are those with the least inequality in scores, which suggests a “virtuous” equity-efficiency trade-off in improving educational outcomes. Analyzing the association of gender, immigrant status, and family background factors with scores, we find large cross-country differences in the relation between those factors and scores.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp117.pdf

CEE Special Report: The Children's Workforce: A Data Scoping Study. A Report for the Department of Children, School and Family (DCSF)

Stephen Machin Sandra McNally Dongshu Ou

CEESP02. July 2010.There has been much policy interest on the theme of children's services in recent years. For example, the 1998 National Child Strategy explicitly aims to ensure good quality, affordable childcare for children aged 0 to 14 in every neighbourhood, including both formal childcare and support for informal arrangements. The sector has a changed a lot in recent years and a there are a range of data sets that explore aspects of how it works. This report explores and describes available data sources on the early years children's workforce, focusing particularly on childcare. We have investigated what administrative or survey data sets are available and how the data sources could be linked together. We start the report with a general introduction to what we mean by the children's workforce' and the sort of questions that could be asked. We summarise the data sets we have looked at, briefly commenting on how they could be used in research. In a detailed appendix, we discuss each of these data sets in turn, highlighting key strengths and limitations. In the core of the text, we provide an analysis of the children's workforce in the Labour Force Survey (occasionally supplemented with information from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings). Finally, we discuss future directions for research in this context.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEESP02.pdf

The Kuznets Curve of Education: A Global Perspective on Education Inequalities

Christian Morrisson Fabrice Murtin

CEEDP0116. June 2010.This paper describes global trends in average educational attainment and in education inequality since 1870, improving the database released by Morrisson-Murtin (2009). Inequality in years of schooling is found to be rapidly decreasing, a direct consequence of the decline in illiteracy. Then, we turn to human capital inequality, and focus, among several other alternatives, on a Mincerian production function of human capital that accounts for diminishing returns to schooling. Within countries, we find evidence of an inverted U-shape curve for human capital inequality, namely a Kuznets curve of education. At the world level, human capital inequality has followed a similar pattern, first increasing from 1870 to 1970, then decreasing.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp116.pdf

The Changing Economic Advantage From Private School

Francis Green Stephen Machin Richard Murphy Yu Zhu

CEEDP0115. April 2010.Despite its relatively small size, the private school sector plays a prominent role in British society. This paper focuses on changing wage and education differentials between privately educated and state educated individuals in Britain. It reports evidence that the private/state school wage differential has risen significantly over time, despite the rising cost of sending children to private school. A significant factor underpinning this result has been faster rising educational attainment for privately educated individuals. Despite these patterns of change, the proportion attending private school has not altered much, nor have the characteristics of those children (and their parents) attending private school. Taken together, our findings are consistent with the idea that the private school sector has been successful in transforming its ability to generate the academic outputs that are most in demand in the modern economy. Because of the increased earnings advantage, private school remains a good investment for parents who want to opt out, but this increase has also contributed to rising wage inequality and falling social mobility.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp115.pdf

Interest Subsidies on Student Loans: A Better Class of Drain

Nicholas Barr Alison Johnston

CEEDP0114. March 2010.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp114.pdf

Valuing School Quality Via School Choice Reform

Stephen Machin Kjell Salvanes

CEEDP0113. March 2010.Among policymakers, educators and economists there remains a strong, sometimes heated, debate on the extent to which good schools matter. This is seen, for instance, in the strong trend towards establishing accountability systems in education in many countries across the world. In this paper, in line with some recent studies, we value school quality using house prices. We, however, adopt a rather different approach to other work, using a policy experiment regarding pupils’ choice to attend high schools to identify the relationship between house prices and school performance. We exploit a change in school choice policy that took place in Oslo county in 1997, where the school authorities opened up the possibility for every pupil to apply to any of the high schools in the county without having to live in the school’s catchment area (the rule that applied before 1997). Our estimates show evidence that parents substantially value better performing schools since the sensitivity of housing valuations to school performance falls significantly by over 50% following the school choice reform.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp113.pdf

Individual Teacher Incentives, Student Achievement and Grade Inflation

Pedro Martins

CEEDP0112. March 2010.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp112.pdf

Measuring the Returns to Lifelong Learning

Jo Blanden Franz Buscha Patrick Sturgis Peter Urwin

CEEDP0110. March 2010.This paper investigates the returns to lifelong learning, which is interpreted as the attainment of qualifications following entry into the labour market. For a number of reasons our analysis of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) represents an important addition to the existing evidence base. We allow for financial and non-financial returns to lifelong learning by using as dependent variables both (i) hourly earnings and (ii) CAMSIS score. A fixed effects specification counters the potential biases that arise from unobserved individual heterogeneity and the inclusion of lags allows estimation of how the returns to lifelong learning evolve over a ten year period after the qualification is obtained. We find evidence of earnings and occupation status returns using a broad categorisation of lifelong learning for both men and women, but more variability in returns when disaggregated NVQ-equivalent categories of qualification are considered. Our findings are broadly in line with existing evidence within the UK, which is mostly based on the analysis of cohort studies. 0f particular interest is the finding that returns to women materialise much sooner after the attainment of a qualification, than is the case for their male counterparts.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp110.pdf

How Much Can We Learn from International Comparisons of Intergenerational Mobility?

Jo Blanden

CEEDP0111. November 2009.This paper summarises research on the relative level of intergenerational mobility – whether classified by income, social class, social status or education – considering observations from 65 countries. With the exception of social class, the different approaches reveal similar patterns. South America, other developing nations, southern European countries and France tending to have rather limited mobility while the Nordic countries exhibit strong mobility. Evidence for the US and Germany differs across the measures, with Germany immobile on education and class and fairly mobile on income and the reverse true for the US. These differences are likely explained by greater within-group income inequality and persistence in the US. The second part of the paper finds that mobility is negatively correlated with inequality and the returns to education and positively correlated with a nation’s education spending.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp111.pdf

The Century of Education

Christian Morrisson Fabrice Murtin

CEEDP0109. September 2009.This paper presents a historical database on educational attainment in 74 countries for the period 1870-2010, using perpetual inventory methods before 1960 and then the Cohen and Soto (2007) database. The correlation between the two sets of average years of schooling in 1960 is equal to 0.96. We use a measurement error framework to merge the two databases, while correcting for a systematic measurement bias in Cohen and Soto (2007) linked to differential mortality across educational groups. Descriptive statistics show a continuous spread of education that has accelerated in the second half of the twentieth century. We find evidence of fast convergence in years of schooling for a sub-sample of advanced countries during the 1870-1914 globalization period, and of modest convergence since 1980. Less advanced countries have been excluded from the convergence club in both cases.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp109.pdf

Length of Compulsory Education and Voter Turnout - Evidence from a Staged Reform

Panu Pelkonen

CEEDP0108. September 2009.In this study, a long-term impact of additional schooling at the lower end of the educational distribution is measured on voter turnout. Schooling is instrumented with a staged Norwegian school reform, which increased minimum attainment by two years – from seven to nine. The impact is measured at two levels: individual, and municipality level. Both levels of analysis suggest that the additional education has no effect on the turnout rates. At the individual level, the impact of education is also tested on various measures of civic outcomes. Of these, only the likelihood of signing a petition is positively affected by education.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp108.pdf

To Leave or Not to Leave? A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of the Impact of Failing High School Exit Exam

Dongshu Ou

CEEDP0107. August 2009.The high school exit exam (HSEE) is rapidly becoming a standardized assessment procedure for educational accountability in the United States. I use a unique state-specific dataset to identify the effect of failing the HSEE on the likelihood that a student drops out early based on a Regression Discontinuity design. It shows that students who barely fail the exam are more likely to exit than those who barely pass despite being offered retest opportunities. The discontinuity amounts to a large proportion of the dropout probability of barely-failers, particularly for minority and low-income students, suggesting that the potential benefit of raising educational standards might come at the cost of increasing inequalities in the educational system.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp107.pdf

University Quality and Graduate Wages in the UK

Iftikhar Hussain Sandra McNally Shqiponja Telhaj

CEEDP0099. March 2009.We examine the links between various measures of university quality and graduate earnings in the United Kingdom. We explore the implications of using different measures of quality and combining them into an aggregate measure. Our findings suggest a positive return to university quality with an average earnings differential of about 6 percent for a one standard deviation rise in university quality. However, the relationship between university quality and wages is highly non-linear, with a much higher return at the top of the distribution. There is some indication that returns may be increasing over time.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp99.pdf

Does Money Matter for Schools?

Helena Holmlund Sandra McNally Martina Viarengo

CEEDP0105. January 2009.There is considerable disagreement in the academic literature about whether raising school expenditure improves educational outcomes. Yet changing the level of resources is one of the key policy levers open to governments. In the UK, school expenditure has increased by about 40 per cent in real terms since 2000. Thus, providing an answer to the question as to whether such spending has an impact on educational outcomes (and whether it is good use of public money) is of paramount importance. In this paper we address this issue for England using much better data than what has generally been used in such studies. We are also able to test our identification assumption by use of a falsification test. We find that the increase in school expenditure over recent years has had a consistently positive effect on outcomes at the end of primary school. Back-of-envelope calculations suggest that the investment may well be cost-effective. There is also some evidence of heterogeneity in the effect of expenditure, with higher effects for students who come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp105.pdf

School Quality, Child Wellbeing and Parents Satisfaction

Steve Gibbons Olmo Silva

CEEDP0103. January 2009.Researchers in economics of education usually assume that parents choose schools for their high academic performance, with some support from revealed preference evidence based on local house prices. However, anecdotal evidence and common sense suggest that school quality is not one-dimensional and that parents and children are concerned about other school factors related to pupil wellbeing. In this paper we consider whether parental notions of school quality are based on academic standards, and whether these notions are aligned with the wellbeing of the children. To do so, we use direct information on stated perceptions in the Longitudinal Survey of Young People in England (LSYPE) matched to UK administrative records on pupil achievements. Our results suggest that test score based measures of school quality tend to dominate parents’ perceptions of educational excellence. However, school quality along this dimension is not strongly associated with pupil happiness and enjoyment of the learning environment.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp103.pdf

What Makes a Test Score? The Respective Contributions of Pupils, Schools and Peers in Achievement in English Primary Education

Francis Kramarz Stephen Machin Amine Ouazad

CEEDP0102. January 2009.This study develops an analytical framework for evaluating the respective contributions of pupils, peers, and school quality in affecting educational achievement. We implement this framework using rich data from England that matches pupils to their primary schools. The dataset records all English pupils and their test scores in Key Stage 1 (age 7) and Key Stage 2 (age 11) national examinations. The quality of the data source, coupled with our econometric techniques, allows us to assess the respective importance of different educational inputs. We can distinguish school effects that affect all pupils irrespective of their year and grade of study, from school-grade-year effects. Identification of pupil effects separately from these school-grade-year effects is achieved because students are mobile across schools. Peer effects are identified assuming variations in school-grade-year group composition in adjacent years are exogenous. We estimate three different specifications, the most general allowing Key Stage 2 results to be affected by the Key Stage 1 school(-grade-year) at which the pupil studied. We discuss the validity of our various exogeneity assumptions. Estimation results show statistically significant pupil ability, school and peer effects. Our analysis suggests the following ranking: pupils' ability and background are more important than school time-invariant inputs. Peer effects are significant, but small.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp102.pdf

Access, Choice and Participation in Higher Education

Steve Gibbons Anna Vignoles

CEEDP0101. January 2009.Geographical distance between parental home and college poses a potential barrier to higher education entry, and could be a deciding factor when choosing between institutions. Some students may be constrained in their education choices because they cannot afford to leave home, or have personal or cultural reasons to remain close to their family. This paper provides quantitative evidence on these issues using administrative data on a cohort of university entrants in England, which includes both individual and school level information. Our findings are that geographical distance has little or no impact on the decision to participate, but has a strong influence on institutional choice. Institution attendance probabilities fall with distance from home, with an elasticity of -1. Small, but behaviourally important differences between demographic groups have implications for the sorting of students across institutions. There are also implications for the spatial distribution of human capital, because the quality of students’ education is linked to the quality of institutions that are close to home.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp101.pdf

Parents' Basic Skills and Childrens' Cognitive Outcomes

Elena Meschi Anna Vignoles Augustin de Coulon

CEEDP0104. December 2008.The main aim of this paper is to assess how parents’ literacy and numeracy affect the cognitive skill of their children. The data used are from the British Cohort Survey (BCS) which provides in 2004 basic skill assessments for all cohort members and cognitive tests for their children. We find strong evidence that parents with higher basic skills have children who perform better in cognitive achievement tests. This result is robust to the inclusion of a wide range of factors, including family characteristics (socio-professional status, qualifications and income levels of the parents), family structure (number of siblings, lone parenthood), child characteristics (gender, age, whether first born, number of siblings) and even parents’ own early cognitive ability as measured at age 5. We estimate a model where cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes of the children are simultaneously determined by their parents’ basic skills and other characteristics (using a SURE approach). We find that parents’ basic skills explain only their children’s cognitive skills, and not their non-cognitive outcomes. We suggest this provides some support for the proposition that parents’ basic skills are having a genuinely causal impact on children’s cognitive skills rather than simply being correlated with other unobserved parental characteristics that improve child achievement.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp104.pdf

Education and Mobility

Stephen Machin Panu Pelkonen Kjell Salvanes

CEEDP0100. December 2008.We show that the length of compulsory education has a causal impact on regional labour mobility. The analysis is based on a quasi-exogenous staged Norwegian school reform, and register data on the whole population. Based on the results, we conclude that part of the US-Europe difference, as well as the European North-South difference in labour mobility, is likely to be due to differences in levels of education in the respective regions.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp100.pdf

Assessed by a Teacher Like Me: Race, Gender and Subjective Evaluations

Amine Ouazad

CEEDP0098. December 2008.The underrepresentation of minority teachers and male teachers remains an issue in US elementary education, and there is evidence that racial interactions partly shape student performance. However there is little work on discrimination within the classroom. Do teachers give better grades to children of their own race, ethnicity or gender? A US nationally representative longitudinal dataset that includes both test scores and teacher assessments offers a unique opportunity to answer this question. I look at the effect of being assessed by a same race or same gender teacher conditionally on test scores, child effects and teacher effects. This strategy controls for three confounding effects: (i) children of different races and genders may react differently in the classroom and during examinations (ii) teachers may capture skills that are not captured by test scores and (iii) tough teachers may be matched with specific races or genders. Results indicate that teachers give higher assessments to children of their own race, but not significantly higher assessments to children of their own gender. Also, this effect comes from the differential assessments given to non-hispanic black and hispanic children. White teachers give significantly lower assessments to non-hispanic black children and to hispanic children. Results are robust to various checks on endogenous mobility, measurement error and reverse causality. Moreover children's behavior is not a significant determinant of same race or same gender matching. Finally relative grading does not explain the main results of this paper.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp98.pdf

The Convergence of Compulsory Schooling in Western Europe: 1950-2000

Fabrice Murtin Martina Viarengo

CEEDP0095. November 2008.This paper examines the expansion of compulsory schooling in fifteen Western European countries over the period 1950-2000. We show that a convergence process of mandatory years of schooling has occurred across these countries since 1950. We argue that the major driver of this phenomenon is the existence of decreasing aggregate returns to education that have limited the extension of compulsory schooling. Then we test whether convergence still holds when confronted with other explanations described in the literature, which are respectively based on technology and trade, institutions, and the budget constraint of governments. Conditional convergence does hold and we find that openness has been another robust determinant of compulsory years of schooling, reflecting the need of education in an increasingly globalized world.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp95.pdf

Intergenerational Mobility and Assortative Mating: Effects of an Educational Reform

Helena Holmlund

CEEDP0091. November 2008.This paper provides new evidence on the role of the educational system for intergenerational mobility. I evaluate an educational reform, implemented in Sweden in the 1950s and 60s, which postponed tracking and extended compulsory education from seven to nine years. The reform may have influenced intergenerational mobility through several different channels. First, it is likely that the reform increased education more for children from low educated households, compared to those children with more educated parents. Second, postponing tracking to higher ages is likely to reduce the parental influence in the educational choice, which may weaken the intergenerational economic link between children and their parents. And finally, recognizing that economic well-being is determined by the income of the household, and that assortative mating plays a major role in the mobility process, I examine how the reform has affected mobility through changes in marital sorting. The underlying hypothesis is that the peer group in which couples form can be affected by the educational system. Differences-in-differences estimates and sibling-difference estimates indicate that the reform indeed resulted in a sizeable increase in intergenerational income mobility, but effects operating through marital sorting seem to play a minor role.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp91.pdf

An Analysis of the Benefit of NVQ2 Qualifications Acquired at Age 26-34

Anna Vignoles Augustin de Coulon

CEEDP0106. October 2008.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp106.pdf

Returns to Apprenticeship Training in Austria: Evidence from Failed Firms

Josef Fersterer Jörn-Steffen Pischke

CEEDP0088. February 2008.Little is known about the payoffs to apprenticeship training in the German speaking countries for the participants. OLS estimates suggest that the returns are similar to those of other types of schooling. However, there is a lot of heterogeneity in the types of apprenticeships offered, and institutional descriptions suggest that there might be an important element of selection in who obtains an apprenticeship, and what type. In order to overcome the resulting ability bias we estimate returns to apprenticeship training for apprentices in failed firms in Austria. When a firm fails, current apprentices cannot complete their training in this firm. Because apprentices will be at different stages in their apprenticeship at that time, the failure of a firm will manipulate the length of the apprenticeship period completed for some apprentices. The time to the firm failure therefore serves as an instrument for the length of the apprenticeship completed both at the original firm and at other firms. We find instrumental variables returns which are similar or larger than the OLS returns in our sample, indicating relatively little selection.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp88.pdf

A Researcher's Guide to the Swedish Compulsory School Reform

Helena Holmlund

CEEDP0087. February 2008.When studying different types of returns to education, educational reforms are commonly used in the economics literature as a source of exogenous variation in education. The Swedish compulsory school reform is one example; the reform extended compulsory education throughout the country, in different municipalities at different points in time. Such variation across cohorts and regions can be used in a differences-in-differences framework, in order to estimate causal effects of education. This paper provides a guide to researchers who consider using the Swedish reform in an empirical analysis: I present a description and background of the reform, provide some baseline results, a reliability analysis of the reform coding, a discussion of whether the reform is a valid instrument, and comment on the interpretation of IV estimates of returns to schooling. The main conclusions are the following: i) a reliability analysis of the reform coding finds a lower bound reliability estimate of 0.66-0.91; ii) the reform indeed raised educational attainment, more so for boys than for girls, and iii) with careful consideration of region-specific trends, the reform can be considered a valid instrument for education.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp87.pdf

Competition for private and state school teachers

Francis Green Stephen Machin Richard Murphy Yu Zhu

CEEDP0094. January 2008.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp94.pdf

Students' academic self-perception

Arnaud Chevalier Steve Gibbons Sherria Hoskins Martin Snell Andy Thorpe

CEEDP0090. January 2008.Participation rates in higher education differ persistently between some groups in society. Using two British datasets we investigate whether this gap is rooted in students’ mis-perception of their own and other’s ability, thereby increasing the expected costs to studying. Among high school pupils, we find that pupils with a more positive view of their academic abilities are more likely to expect to continue to higher education even after controlling for observable measures of ability and students’ characteristics. University students are also poor at estimating their own test-performance and over-estimate their predicted test score. However, females, white and working class students have less inflated view of themselves. Self-perception has limited impact on the expected probability of success and expected returns amongst these university students.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp90.pdf

The effects of higher education funding reforms on the lifetime incomes of graduates

Lorraine Dearden Emla Fitzsimons Alissa Goodman Greg Kaplan

CEEDP0078. January 2008.This paper undertakes a quantitative analysis of substantial reforms to the system of higher education (HE) finance first announced in 2004 and then revised again in July 2007. The reforms introduced deferred fees for HE, payable by graduates through the tax system in the form of income-contingent repayments on loans subsidised by the government. Lifetime earnings that have been simulated by the authors using innovative methods, are used to analyse the likely distributional consequences of the reforms for graduates. It is shown that graduates with low lifetime earnings will pay less for their HE than graduates higher up the lifetime earnings distribution compared to the system operating before the reforms. Taxpayers will bear substantial costs due to the interest rate and debt write-off subsidies. The extent to which the reforms are likely to shift the balance of funding for HE between the public and private sector is also analysed, as well as the likely distributional consequences of a number of variations to the system such as removing the interest subsidy from the loans.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp78.pdf

When You Are Born Matters: The Imapct of Date of Birth on Child Cognitive Outcomes in England

Claire Crawford Lorraine Dearden Costas Meghir

CEEDP0093. October 2007.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp93.pdf

The Impact of Early Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Skills on Later Outcomes

Pedro Carneiro Claire Crawford Alissa Goodman

CEEDP0092. October 2007.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp92.pdf

The Returns to Qualifications in England: Updating the Evidence Base on Level 2 and Level 3 Vocational Qualifications

Charley Greenwood Andrew Jenkins Anna Vignoles

CEEDP0089. September 2007.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp89.pdf

Studying Abroad and the Effect on International Labor Market Mobility: Evidence from the Introduction of Erasmus

Matthias Parey Fabian Waldinger

CEEDP0086. August 2007.We investigate the e¤ect of studying abroad on international labor market mobility later in life for German university graduates. As a source of identifying variation, we exploit the introduction and expansion of the ERASMUS student exchange program, which significantly increases a student's probability of studying abroad. Using an Instrument Variable approach we control for unobserved heterogeneity between individuals who studied abroad and those who did not. Our results indicate that student exchange mobility is an important determinant of later international labor market mobility: We find that studying abroad increases an individual's probability of working in a foreign country by about 15 to 20 percentage points, suggesting that study abroad spells are an mportant channel to later outmigration. The results are robust to a number of specification checks.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp86.pdf

Educational Effects of Widening Access to the Academic Track: A Natural Experiment

Eric Maurin Sandra McNally

CEEDP0085. August 2007.It is difficult to know whether widening access to schools which provide a more academically oriented general education makes a difference to average educational achievement. We make use of reforms affecting admission to the ‘high ability’ track in Northern Ireland, but not England. The comparison of educational outcomes between Northern Ireland and England before and after the reform identifies the net effect of expanding the academic track to accommodate more students. This is composed of the direct effect of the more academic track on individual performance and the indirect effect arising on account of the change in peer group composition. Our paper is relevant to debate on the consequences of ability tracking and of expanding access to the academic track.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp85.pdf

Mobility and School Disruption

Steve Gibbons Shqiponja Telhaj

CEEDP0083. August 2007.We consider the influence that mobile pupils have on the academic achievements of other pupils in English primary schools. We find that immobile pupils in year-groups (à la US “grades”) that experience high pupil entry rates progress less well academically between ages 8 and 11 than pupils in low-mobility year groups (grades), even within the same school. The disruptive externalities of mobility are statistically significant, but actually very small in terms of their educational impact. An increase in annual entry rates from 0 to 10% (a 4 standard deviation change) would set the average incumbent pupil back by between 1 and 2 weeks, or about 4% of one standard deviation of the gain in pupil achievement between ages 7 and 11.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp83.pdf

The Impact of Computer Use, Computer Skills and Computer Use Intensity: Evidence from WERS 2004.

Peter Dolton Panu Pelkonen

CEEDP0081. August 2007.Computers and ICT have changed the way we live and work. The latest WERS 2004 provides a snapshot of how using ICT at the workplace has changed our working lives. Various studies have suggested that the use of a computer at work boosted earnings by as much as 20%. Others suggest this reported impact is due to unobserved heterogeneity. Using excellent data from the WERS employer-employee matched data we compare OLS estimates with those from estimations which include controls for establishments, industrial sectors and occupations and use control function, treatment effects models and Instrumental Variable estimation. We show that the results of OLS estimation grossly overestimate the return to computer use but that including occupation controls, reduces the return to between 3-10%. We explore the return on different IT skills and also find a return to the intensity of computer use as measured by the number of tasks a computer is used for.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp81.pdf

Over-Education and the Skills of UK Graduates

Arnaud Chevalier Joanne Lindley

CEEDP0079. August 2007.During the early Nineties the proportion of UK graduates doubled over a very short period of time. This paper investigates the effect of the expansion on early labour market attainment, focusing on over-education. We define over-education by combining occupation codes and a self-reported measure for the appropriateness of the match between qualification and the job. We therefore define three groups of graduates: matched, apparently over-educated and genuinely over-educated; to compare pre- and post-expansion cohorts of graduates. We find the proportion of over-educated graduates has doubled, even though over-education wage penalties have remained stable. This suggests that the labour market accommodated most of the large expansion of university graduates. Apparently over-educated graduates are mostly undistinguishable from matched graduates, while genuinely over-educated graduates principally lack non-academic skills such as management and leadership. Additionally, genuine over-education increases unemployment by three months but has no impact of the number of jobs held. Individual unobserved heterogeneity differs between the three groups of graduates but controlling for it, does not alter these conclusions.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp79.pdf

Use IT or Lose IT? The Impact of Computers on Earnings

Peter Dolton Gerry Makepeace Helen Robinson

CEEDP0082. June 2007.The extent to which the impact of computer skills depends on how computers are used is investigated using British data from an establishment survey, cohort studies and the European E-Living survey. We examine the importance of activity and frequency of use in these various data sources. We find that the impact on earnings depends on which cohort of workers is examined and that there are differences over time. The regression results show that the use of computers for internet access and for email is positively significant across all of our datasets, although there are differences in the size of the effects between men and women.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp82.pdf

Is Free School Meal Status a Valid Proxy for Socio-Economic Status (in Schools Research)?

Graham Hobbs Anna Vignoles

CEEDP0084. May 2007.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp84.pdf

Urban Density and Pupil Attainment

Steve Gibbons Olmo Silva

CEEDP0080. May 2007.We explore the association between urban density and pupil attainment using three cohorts of pupils in schooling in England. Although – as widely recognised – attainment in dense urban places is low on average, this is not because urban environments disadvantage pupils, but because the most disadvantaged pupils with low average attainments attend the most urbanised schools. To control for this, we exploit changes in urban density faced by pupils during compulsory transition from Primary to Secondary school, and measure educational progress at the end of the Secondary phase, relative to attainments at the end of Primary schooling. Our results suggest that there are small but significant benefits from education in schools in more densely urbanised settings: Pupils in schools in relatively dense places – measured in terms of school density and other urban indicators – progress faster than others in their cohort, but the elasticity is low, at around 0.02. We detect this density advantage even amongst pupils moving relatively short distances between Primary and Secondary schools within urban areas, so we cannot attribute it to broad urbanisation effects experienced by pupils making rural-urban school moves. A more likely explanation lies in greater school choice and competition between closely co-located educational providers.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp80.pdf

The Value of Basic Skills in the British Labour Market

Oscar Marcenaro Gutierrez Anna Vignoles Augustin de Coulon

CEEDP0077. May 2007.In this paper we evaluate the labour market value of basic skills in the UK, focusing on the wage and employment returns to having better literacy and numeracy skills. We draw on literacy and numeracy assessments undertaken by all cohort members of the UK 1970 British Cohort Study. The data used are very rich and allow us to account for potential ability bias, including as they do early childhood assessments of ability. We find that the literacy and numeracy effects on earnings are over and above any general effect on earnings from a person being more cognitively able. We also assess whether the value of basic skills, in terms of wage returns, has increased over time, using a cross cohort analysis based on the 1958 National Child Development Study cohort and the 1970 British Cohort Study. Our results show that literacy and numeracy skills retained their high value in the labour market over the period 1995-2004, despite numerous policy attempts to increase the supply of basic skills during this period.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp77.pdf

Higher Education Academic Salaries in the UK

Mark Collins Anna Vignoles James Walker

CEEDP0075. May 2007.The recent industrial action taken by the Association of University Teachers (AUT) has given the issue of academic pay high prominence in the UK press. There appears to be a remarkable consensus that higher education academic salaries are too low, relative to other groups of workers in the UK, and that this is leading to an academic ‘brain drain’. There is concern that this in turn will result in lower quality higher education, as universities fail to attract the ‘brightest and the best’. To rise above the rhetoric, there is a pressing need for robust evidence on relative academic salaries. In this paper, we compare the salaries of Higher Education teaching professionals in the United Kingdom with those of other comparable professionals. We offer evidence on relative salaries in HE academia over the last decade or so and we compare academic salaries to a range of different comparator groups, including some specific occupational groupings that one might view as more similar, in terms of unobserved characteristics, to academics. We then consider the extent to which the gap between the earnings of HE academics and that of other occupations is attributable to differences in the characteristics of academics, for example the fact that they are more highly educated on average, or to differences in the price paid for a given set of characteristics. We conclude that HE teaching professionals earn somewhat lower earnings than most public sector graduates and do particularly poorly compared to most other comparable professionals; they also work longer hours than most. In particular, academic earnings compare poorly to those in the legal professions, consultants physicians and dental practitioners (across both the public and private sectors). On the other hand, there are groups of public sector workers that do worse than HE academics, and in particular FE academics earn significantly less.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp75.pdf

Resources and Standards in Urban Schools

Stephen Machin Sandra McNally Costas Meghir

CEEDP0076. February 2007.Despite being central to government education policy in many countries, there remains considerable debate about whether resources matter for pupil outcomes. In this paper we look at this question by considering an English education policy initiative - Excellence in Cities – which has been a flagship policy aimed at raising standards in inner-city secondary schools. We report results showing a positive impact of the extra resources on school attendance and performance in Mathematics (though not for English) but, interestingly, there is a marked heterogeneity in the effectiveness of the policy. Its greatest impact has been in more disadvantaged schools and on the performance of middle and high ability students within these schools. A simple cost-benefit calculation suggests the policy to be cost-effective. We conclude that additional resources can matter for children in the poorest secondary schools, particularly when building on a solid educational or ability background. However, small changes in resources have little or no effect on the ‘hard to reach’ children who have not achieved a sufficiently strong prior level.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp76.pdf

The Long Term Impacts of Compulsory Schooling: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in School Leaving Dates

Emilia Del Bono Fernando Galindo-Rueda

CEEDP0074. January 2007.This paper investigates a unique feature of the English educational system to estimate the causal effect of compulsory schooling on labour market outcomes. We examine school leaving rules that allow for discrete variation in exit dates by date of birth within school cohorts. This natural experiment enables a regression discontinuity design that differences out confounding factors discussed in the literature. Individuals compelled to stay in school for as little as three months longer than their classmates tend to achieve significantly higher qualification levels and experience better labour market outcomes. Our analysis of variation of impacts by age of compulsory schooling allows us to provide valuable new insights on the role of education credentials in the labour market.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp74.pdf

Are Schools Drifting Apart? Intake Stratification in English Secondary Schools

Steve Gibbons Shqiponja Telhaj

CEEDP0064. December 2006.The issue of social segregation in schools has seen a recent resurgence of interest – in the US, UK and internationally – as the debate rages on about whether policies that expand families’ freedom to choose amongst schools encourage divergence or convergence in the types of pupil different schools admit. Most attention has been focussed on segregation along lines of ethnic or social background. Yet, the real consideration that seems to be in the back of most people’s minds is the issue of segregation or stratification of schools along lines of pupil ability. We look explicitly at this issue using data on the population of pupils entering Secondary school in England from 1996 to 2002. Our study does highlight wide disparities between peer-group ability in different schools. But we also find that, contrary to popular opinion, almost nothing has changed over these years in terms of the way pupils of different age-11 abilities are sorted into different Secondary schools.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp64.pdf

Faith Primary Schools: Better Schools or Better Pupils?

Steve Gibbons Olmo Silva

CEEDP0072. November 2006.We provide estimates of the effect of attending a Faith school on educational attainment progress during the Primary education phase in England. We argue that there are no credible instruments for Faith school attendance. Instead, we control for selection on religious schooling by tracking pupils over time and comparing attainments of students who exhibit different levels of commitment to religious education through their choice of Secondary school and residence. Our findings suggest that, once family preferences and selection into religious education are controlled for, Faith schools have only a very small effect on pupil educational progression in Primary school, this effect being between zero and under one-percentile on test scores at age 11, conditional on scores at age 7.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp72.pdf

Accounting for Intergenerational Income Persistence: Non-Cognitive Skills, Ability and Education

Jo Blanden Paul Gregg Lindsey Macmillan Lindsey Macmillan

CEEDP0073. September 2006.We analyse in detail the factors that lead to intergenerational persistence among sons, where this is measured as the association between childhood family income and later adult earnings. We seek to account for the level of income persistence in the 1970 BCS cohort and also to explore the decline in mobility in the UK between the 1958 NCDS cohort and the 1970 cohort. The mediating factors considered are cognitive skills, noncognitive traits, educational attainment and labour market attachment. Changes in the relationships between these variables, parental income and earnings are able to explain over 80% of the rise in intergenerational persistence across the cohorts.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp73.pdf

Sheepskin or Prozac: The Causal Effect of Education on Mental Health

Arnaud Chevalier L Feinstein

CEEDP0071. August 2006.Mental illness is associated with large costs to individuals and society. Education improves various health outcomes but little work has been done on mental illness. To obtain unbiased estimates of the effect of education on mental health, we rely on a rich longitudinal dataset that contains health information from childhood to adulthood and thus allow us to control for fixed effects in mental health. We measure two health outcomes: malaise score and depression and estimate the extensive and intensive margins of education on mental health using various estimators. For all estimators, accounting for the endogeneity of education augments its protecting effect on mental health. We find that the effect of education is greater at mid-level of qualifications, for women and for individuals at greater risk of mental illness. The effects of education are observed at all ages, additionally education also reduces the transition to depression. These results suggest substantial returns to education in term of improved mental health.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp71.pdf

Education, Occupation and Career Expectations: Determinants of the Gender Pay Gap for UK Graduates

Arnaud Chevalier

CEEDP0069. August 2006.A large proportion of the gender wage gap is usually left unexplained. In this paper, we investigate whether the unexplained component is due to misspecification. Using a sample of recent UK graduates, we introduce variables on career expectations and character traits, variables that are typically not observed. The evidence indicates that women are more altruistic and less career-oriented than men. The main difference concerns career break expectations which explains 10% of the gender wage gap in our favoured model. By omitting attitudinal variables most studies are likely to over-estimate the unexplained component of the gender wage gap. Women with a more traditional view concerning childrearing are also found to have less intensive search behaviour. These results suggest that without a change in attitudes, the gender wage gap is likely to remain at its current level.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp69.pdf

Using Rate of Return Analyses to Understand Sector Skill Needs

Nattavudh Powdthavee Anna Vignoles

CEEDP0070. July 2006.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp70.pdf

Close Neighbours Matter: Neighbourhood Effects on Early Performance at School

Dominique Goux Eric Maurin

CEEDP0068. July 2006.Children’s outcomes are strongly correlated with those of their neighbours. The extent to which this is causal is the subject of an extensive literature. An identification problem exists because people with similar characteristics are observed to live in close proximity. Another major difficulty is that neighbourhoods measured in available data are often considerably larger than those which matter for outcomes (i.e. close neighbours). Several institutional features of France enable us to address these problems. We find that an adolescent’s performance at the end of junior high-school are strongly influenced by the performance of other adolescents in the neighbourhood.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp68.pdf

Which Skills Matter?

Pedro Carneiro Claire Crawford Alissa Goodman

CEEDP0059. July 2006.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/cee%20dps/ceedp59.pdf

Comprehensive Versus Selective Schooling in England and Wales: What Do We Know?

Alan Manning Jörn-Steffen Pischke

CEEDP0066. June 2006.British secondary schools moved from a system of extensive and early selection and tracking in secondary schools to one with comprehensive schools during the 1960s and 70s. Before the reform, students would take an exam at age eleven, which determined whether they would attend an academically oriented grammar school or a lower level secondary school. The reform proceeded at an uneven pace in different areas, so that both secondary school systems coexist during the 1960s and 70s. The British transition therefore provides an excellent laboratory for the study of the impact of a comprehensive versus a selective school system on student achievement. Previous studies analyzing this transition have typically used a value added methodology: they compare outcomes for students passing through either type of school controlling for achievement levels at the time of entering secondary education. While this seems like a reasonable research design, we demonstrate that it is unlikely to successfully eliminate selection effects in who attends what type of school. Very similar results are obtained by looking at the effect of secondary school environment on achievement at age 11 and controlling for age 7 achievement. Since children only enter secondary school at age 11, these effects are likely due to selection bias. Careful choice of treatment and control areas, and using political control of the county as an instrument for early implementation of the comprehensive regime do not solve this problem.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp66.pdf

The Mobility of English School Children

Stephen Machin Shqiponja Telhaj Joan Wilson

CEEDP0067. May 2006.In this paper we examine links between pupil mobility and pupil and school characteristics at all levels of compulsory schooling in England. We derive measures of mobility from two academic years of the Pupil Level Annual School Census (PLASC) data, a unique national administrative pupil level longitudinal data source. Our findings suggest that mobile pupils are more socially disadvantaged than non-mobile pupils and are significantly less likely to have a good prior education record. Moreover, we find that pupils are less likely to move if the school they attend has good average performance levels. Finally, when children move school, they are more likely to end up in a school with better Key Stage performance than the one they left, but this improvement is significantly more marked for children from better off backgrounds.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp67.pdf

Peer Effects in European Primary Schools: Evidence from PIRLS

Andreas Ammermueller Jörn-Steffen Pischke

CEEDP0065. May 2006.We estimate peer effects for fourth graders in six European countries. The identification relies on variation across classes within schools. We argue that classes within primary schools are formed roughly randomly with respect to family background. Similar to previous studies, we find sizeable estimates of peer effects in standard OLS specifications. The size of the estimate is much reduced within schools. This could be explained either by selection into schools or by measurement error in the peer background variable. When we correct for measurement error we find within school estimates close to the original OLS estimates. Our results suggest that the peer effect is modestly large, measurement error is important in our survey data, and selection plays little role in biasing peer effects estimates. We find no significant evidence of non-linear peer effects.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp65.pdf

Peer Effects and Pupil Attainment: Evidence from Secondary School Transition

Steve Gibbons Shqiponja Telhaj

CEEDP0063. May 2006.It is a common belief that children will thrive if educated amongst better class and schoolmates. It is a belief that guides many parents in their choice of school, and has important implications for policy on school choice and organisation. Many studies have tried to measure this ‘peer-group’ effect, but the enterprise is plagued by conceptual and empirical difficulties. In this study, we use the population of state Secondary school pupils in England to tease out how pupil attainments at age 14 respond to differences in the prior, age-11 attainments of their current school grade peer-group. Data on home addresses and school attendance allow us to compare outcomes of children who live in the same street, or who attended the same Primary school up to age 11, but then move on to different Secondary schools with different peer-group quality. These ‘peer-group’ effects seem to exist, but they are small in magnitude – a 1 s.d. increase in peer-group prior attainments allows a pupil to improve their own score by barely 0.08 of a standard deviation. We tackle various gnarly empirical problems arising in regression models of pupil attainments that incorporate individual and group prior attainments as explanatory variables. Estimates from such models are seriously biased by transient components in prior pupil attainments, correlation between current and prior peer-group characteristics and by ability sorting into Secondary schooling. We address these issues by using teachers predictions as instruments for prior attainments, defining a pupil’s current peer-group in terms of those school mates with whom he or she has had no contact in the past, and by predicting current peer-group attainments with the productivity of their origin Primary schools, measured by the gain in attainments of different cohorts between ages 7 and 11.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp63.pdf

From the Cradle to the Labor Market? The Effect of Birth Weight on Adult Outcomes

Sandra E. Black Paul Devereux Kjell Salvanes

CEEDP0061. March 2006.Lower birth weight babies have worse outcomes, both short-run in terms of one year mortality rates and longer run in terms of educational attainment and earnings. However, recent research has called into question whether birth weight itself is important or whether it simply reflects other hard-to-measure haracteristics. By applying within twin techniques using a unique dataset from Norway, we xamine both short-run and long-run outcomes for the same cohorts. We find that birth weight does matter; very small short-run fixed effect estimates can be misleading because longer-run effects on outcomes such as height, IQ, earnings, and education are significant and similar in magnitude to OLS estimates. Our estimates suggest that eliminating birth weight differences between socio-economic groups would have sizeable effects on the later outcomes of children from poorer families.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp61.pdf

What Should an Index of School Segregation Measure?

Rebecca Allen Anna Vignoles

CEEDP0060. March 2006.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp60.pdf

Education Policy in the UK

Stephen Machin Anna Vignoles

CEEDP0057. March 2006.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp57.pdf

Gender and Student Achievement in English Schools

Stephen Machin Sandra McNally

CEEDP0058. February 2006.The widening gap between the average educational achievement of boys and girls has been the subject of much discussion. This gap is especially controversial for students taking national exams at the end of their compulsory education. However, the gender gap is also apparent at earlier and at later stages of education. In this paper, we analyse changes over time in the gender achievement gap at the different stages of compulsory education. We first use a combination of data sources to paint a picture of how gender gaps have evolved over time and in what context they are most marked. Then we consider possible explanations for the observed gender gaps. We look at the relevance of school inputs, teaching practice and the examination system for explaining the gender gap. We also discuss the potential influence of wider social and economic changes as reflected, for example, in the much higher education of mothers relative to those of previous generations. Analysis of this issue is important in the context of research on the gender wage gap. However, it is also raises policy-relevant issues in relation to whether changes in the school system can effect a change in the gender gap in educational achievement.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp58.pdf

Competition, Choice and Pupil Achievement

Steve Gibbons Steve Gibbons Stephen Machin Olmo Silva

CEEDP0056. January 2006.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp56.pdf

New Technology in Schools: Is There a Payoff?

Stephen Machin Sandra McNally Olmo Silva

CEEDP0055. January 2006.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp55.pdf

Zero Returns to Compulsory Schooling in Germany: Evidence and Interpretation

Jörn-Steffen Pischke Till von Wachter

CEEDP0054. January 2006.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp54.pdf

Education Subsidies and School Drop-Out Rates

Lorraine Dearden Carl Emmerson Christine Frayne Costas Meghir Costas Meghir

CEEDP0053. January 2006.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp53.pdf

The Heterogeneous Effect of Selection in Secondary Schools: Understanding the Changing Role of Ability

Fernando Galindo-Rueda Anna Vignoles

CEEDP0052. June 2005.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp52.pdf

Should Research Universities be led by top researchers? Part 1: Are they?

Amanda Goodall

CEEDP0051. June 2005.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp51.pdf

The More the Merrier? The Effect of Family Size and Birth Order on Children's Education

S Black Paul Devereux Kjell Salvanes

CEEDP0050. June 2005.There is an extensive theoretical literature that postulates a trade off between child quantity and quality within a family. However, there is little causal evidence that speaks to this theory. Using a rich dataset on the entire population of Norway over an extended period of time, we examine the effects of family size and birth order on the educational attainment of children. While we find a negative correlation between family size and children's education, when we include indicators for birth order and/or use twin births as an instrument, family size effects become negligible. In addition, birth order has a significant and large negative effect on children's education. We also study adult earnings, employment, and teenage childbearing, and find strong evidence for birth order effects with these outcomes, particularly among women. These findings suggest the need to revisit economic models of fertility and child 'production', focusing not only on differences across families but differences within families as well.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp50.pdf

Vive la Revolution! Long term returns of 1968 to the angry students

Eric Maurin Sandra McNally

CEEDP0049. June 2005.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp49.pdf

The Role of Credit Constraints in Educational Choices: Evidence from NCDS and BCS70

Lorraine Dearden Leslie McGranahan Barbara Sianesi

CEEDP0048. December 2004.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp48.pdf

Evaluating the Impact of Education on Earnings in the UK: Models, Methods and Results from the NCDS

Richard Blundell Lorraine Dearden Barbara Sianesi

CEEDP0047. December 2004.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp47.pdf

An In-Depth Analysis of the Returns to National Vocational Qualifications Obtained at level 2

Lorraine Dearden Leslie McGranahan Barbara Sianesi

CEEDP0046. December 2004.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp46.pdf

Returns to Education for the 'Marginal Learner': Evidence from the BCS70

Lorraine Dearden Leslie McGranahan Leslie McGranahan Barbara Sianesi

CEEDP0045. December 2004.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp45.pdf

The Widening Socio-Economic Gap in UK Higher Education

Fernando Galindo-Rueda Oscar Marcenaro Anna Vignoles

CEEDP0044. December 2004.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp44.pdf

The Literacy Hour

Stephen Machin Sandra McNally

CEEDP0043. December 2004.Literacy matters. One in five adults in the UK is not functionally literate and this has serious implications for their well-being and economic circumstances, as well as for national productivity. To ensure that this problem does not beset future generations, attention must be given to how best to educate the young to read and write. While economists have much to say about the influence of changing school resources on pupil attainment, there is very little economic research about the effect of changing the content and structure of teaching. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of "the literacy hour" in English primary schools on pupil attainment. This was first introduced in the context of the National Literacy Project (NLP) in September 1996, before it was implemented nationally from September 1998 onwards in the context of the National Literacy Strategy. The central idea is to raise standards of literacy in schools by improving the quality of teaching through more focused literacy instruction and effective classroom management. We evaluate the literacy hour for schools in the National Literacy Project (NLP), which was undertaken in about 400 English primary schools in the school years 1996-97 and 1997-98. We compare the reading and overall English attainment of children in NLP schools as compared to a set of control schools at the end of primary school education (age 11). We find a large increase in attainment in reading and English for pupils in NLP schools as compared to pupils not exposed to the literacy hour over this time period. A further aspect of this policy is its potential impact on the gender gap in pupil attainment. For many years, the attainment of boys in literacy-related activities has been considerably lower than that of girls. We find some evidence that at age 11, boys received a greater benefit from the literacy hour than girls. Finally, we consider the cost-effectiveness of the policy. The benefits of the policy (in terms of standard deviations) are comparable to much more expensive policies such as a class size reduction. We estimate the wage return likely to arise from the increase in reading attainment as a consequence of the literacy hour. The per-pupil cost of the NLP is only a small fraction of the estimated benefits. Hence, the policy is extremely cost effective. These findings are of strong significance when placed into the wider education debate about what works best in schools for improving pupil performance. The evidence reported here suggests that public policy aimed at changing the content and structure of teaching can significantly raise pupil attainment.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp43.pdf

Paying for primary schools: supply constraints, school popularity or congestion?

Steve Gibbons Stephen Machin

CEEDP0042. December 2004.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp42.pdf

Family Income and Educational Attainment: A Review of Approaches and Evidence for Britain

Jo Blanden Paul Gregg

CEEDP0041. September 2004.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp41.pdf

Parental Education and Child's Education: A Natural Experiment

Arnaud Chevalier

CEEDP0040. September 2004.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp40.pdf

Women, Lifelong Learning and Employment

Andrew Jenkins

CEEDP0039. September 2004.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp39.pdf

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Specialist Schools

Andrew Jenkins Rosalind Levacic

CEEDP0038. September 2004.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp38.pdf

Regional Variations in Adult Learning and Vocational Training: Evidence from NCDS and WERS 98

Andrew Jenkins Alison Wolf

CEEDP0037. January 2004.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp37.pdf

The Labour Market Impact of Adult Education and Training: A cohort analysis

L Feinstein Fernando Galindo-Rueda Anna Vignoles

CEEDP0036. January 2004.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp36.pdf

Further Analysis of the Returns to Academic and Vocational Qualifications

Steven McIntosh

CEEDP0035. January 2004.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp35.pdf

The Impact of the School Year on Student Performance and Earnings: Evidence from the German short school years

Jörn-Steffen Pischke

CEEDP0034. January 2004.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp34.pdf

Does it pay to attend a prestigious university?

Arnaud Chevalier Gavan Conlon

CEEDP0033. May 2003.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp33.pdf

Class Ridden or Meritocratic? An Economic Analysis of Recent Changes in Britain

Fernando Galindo-Rueda Anna Vignoles

CEEDP0032. May 2003.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp32.pdf

Employer Learning and Schooling-Related Statistical Discrimination in Britain

Fernando Galindo-Rueda

CEEDP0031. May 2003.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp31.pdf

Are Education Subsides an Efficient Redistributive Device?

Robert Dur Coen Teulings

CEEDP0030. May 2003.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp30.pdf

Recruiting and Retaining Teachers in the UK: An Analysis of Graduate Occupation Choice from the 1960s to the 1990s

Arnaud Chevalier Peter Dolton Steven McIntosh

CEEDP0021. November 2002.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP21.pdf

The Growth of Psychometric Testing for Selection Why Has Test Use Increased,Will Growth Continue, and What Does This Mean for Education?

Andrew Jenkins Alison Wolf

CEEDP0029. June 2002.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP29.pdf

Monotonicity and the Roy Model

Arnaud Chevalier Gauthier Lanot

CEEDP0028. June 2002.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP28.pdf

Why Do Employers Use Selection Tests? Evidence from British Workplaces

Andrew Jenkins Alison Wolf

CEEDP0027. June 2002.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP27.pdf

Changes in Intergenerational Mobility in Britain

Jo Blanden Alissa Goodman Paul Gregg Stephen Machin

CEEDP0026. June 2002.This paper flatly contradicts the common view that anyone can make it in modern Britain. Indeed, rather then weakening, the link between an individual's earnings and those of his or her parents has strengthened. An important part of the explanation is that the expansion of higher education has benefited people from rich families much more than those from poor families. The extent of intergenerational mobility is frequently seen as a measure of the degree of equality of opportunity in society and considerable research has been devoted to obtaining an accurate estimate of it for a number of countries. However little is known about how these connections have altered through time. Sharp increases in educational attainment and rises in earnings (and living standards in general) in more recent generations mean that many observers seem to think that we now live in a more mobile, meritocratic society than in the past. Contrary to this, this research seems to show that where you come from matters more now than in the past. It appears that the extent of intergenerational mobility has actually fallen. The research uses unique data that follow two cohorts of children (one born in 1958, one born in 1970) through childhood and into adulthood. The latest data, collected in 2000, make it possible, for the first time, for researchers to get a good measure of the adult earnings of the second cohort. The key findings are: [1]The connection between earnings and parental income has strengthened for the more recent cohort. Estimates of the relationship between childhood family income and son's adult earnings show that for the 1958 cohort, a son from a family with twice as much income as a second family will earn about 12 percent more in his early thirties than a son from the second family. In the 1970 cohort, the same figure is 25 percent. Therefore, the degree of intergenerational transmission has risen by 13 percentage points. Results for daughters are very similar; [2] Part of the fall in mobility across generations is due to the fact that the expansion of the higher education system has benefited people from rich fa milies much more than those from poor families. This is particularly the case for daughters. The results show that differences in educational attainment across family background have led to a decline in equality of opportunity. This is despite the large expansion in postcompulsory schooling that occurred between the two cohorts. This may be unexpected to some observers, who see great gains in education and earnings from one generation to another and leave the story there. - But these gains have been unequally distributed across society. The majority of beneficiaries have been children from families who were already doing well. If, as seems to have happened, able children from lower income families are excluded from the expansion of education, this will lower national productivity and income in the long run. The implication for government policy is clear. If equality of opportunity is a serious goal of government, it can be facilitated in a way that can enhance economic welfare via policies directed at high ability children whose parents are doing less well.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP26.pdf

Geography, Resources and Primary School Performance

Steve Gibbons

CEEDP0025. June 2002.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP25.pdf

Britain''s Record on Skills

Richard Layard Steven McIntosh Anna Vignoles

CEEDP0023. May 2002.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP23.pdf

Participation in Post Compulsory Education in England: What explains the Boom and Bust

Damon Clark

CEEDP0024. April 2002.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP24.pdf

Returns to Education: Evidence from UK Twins

Dorothe Bonjour Lynn Cherkas Jonathan Haskel Denise Hawkes Tim Spector

CEEDP0022. April 2002.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP22.pdf

The Determinants and Effects of Lifelong Learning

Fernando Galindo-Rueda Andrew Jenkins Anna Vignoles Alison Wolf

CEEDP0019. April 2002.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP19.pdf

The Determinants of Undertaking Academic and Vocational Qualifications in the UK

Gavan Conlon

CEEDP0020. February 2002.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP20.pdf

Neighbourhood Effects on Educational Achievement

Steve Gibbons

CEEDP0018. February 2002.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP18.pdf

Paying for good neighbours? Neighbourhood deprivation and the communiy benefits of education

Steve Gibbons

CEEDP0017. October 2001.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP17.pdf

Estimating the Returns to Education: Models, Methods and Results

Lorraine Dearden Barbara Sianesi

CEEDP0016. October 2001.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP16.pdf

Valuing Primary Schools

Steve Gibbons Stephen Machin

CEEDP0015. September 2001.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP15.pdf

The incidence and outcomes associated with the late attainment of qualifications in the United Kingdom

Gavan Conlon

CEEDP0013. July 2001.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP13.pdf

Companies use of psychometric testing and the changing demand for skills: A review of the literature

Andrew Jenkins

CEEDP0012. June 2001.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP12.pdf

The differential in earnings premia between academically and vocationally trained males in the United Kingdom

Gavan Conlon

CEEDP0011. June 2001.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP11.pdf

The effective use of student time: A stochastic frontier production function case study

Peter Dolton Oscar Marcenaro Lucia Navarro

CEEDP0010. June 2001.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP10.pdf

Over education in the graduate labour market: Some evidence from alumni data

Peter Dolton

CEEDP0009. June 2001.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP09.pdf

The effect of a social experiment in education

Costas Megir Martin Palme

CEEDP0014. May 2001.The impact of compulsory schooling laws as well as the abolition of early selection by ability remain important issues in the educational debate. These issues were the focus of a major education reform in Sweden which was implemented in the 60s. The reform was preceded by a “social experiment" in which only a proportion of municipalities received the new school system. We use survey data linked with tax records covering 10% of one of the cohorts who were educated during the experimental period, to evaluate the impact of the reform on educational attainment and earnings. We find significant increases in the educational attainment of individuals from poorer backgrounds. We also find that the largest impact on earnings was for higher ability individuals from poorer backgrounds. In addition we estimate the returns to education for those affected by the reform. By exploiting the differential impact of the reform by county we are able, in some cases, to distinguish its direct effect on earnings from the effect it had by increasing the quantity of education. We find that the main source of increased earnings came from increasing educational attainment.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP14.pdf

The relative effect of family and financial characteristics on educational echievement

Arnaud Chevalier Gauthier Lanot

CEEDP0008. April 2001.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP08.pdf

The Returns to Education: A Review of Evidence, Issues and Deficiencies in the Literature

Colm Harmon Hessel Oosterbeek

CEEDP0005. December 2000.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP05.pdf

Graduate over-education in the UK

Arnaud Chevalier

CEEDP0007. November 2000.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP07.pdf

The Returns to Education: A Review of the Macro-Economic Literature

Barbara Sianesi John Van Reenen

CEEDP0006. November 2000.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP06.pdf

The Returns to Academic and Vocational Qualifications in Britain

Lorraine Dearden Steven McIntosh Michal Myck Anna Vignoles

CEEDP0004. November 2000.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP04.pdf

Measuring and Assessing the Impact of Basic Skills on Labour Market Outcomes

Steven McIntosh Anna Vignoles

CEEDP0003. November 2000.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP03.pdf

The Relationship between Resource Allocation and Pupil Attainment: A Review

Rosalind Levacic Stephen Machin David Reynolds Anna Vignoles James Walker

CEEDP0002. November 2000.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP02.pdf

An Audit of the Data Needs of the DfEE Centres on the Economics of Education and the Wider Benefits of Learning

Tanvi Desai Estela Montado Anna Vignoles

CEEDP0001. November 2000.

Full discussion paper: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/CEEDP01.pdf