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We propose a new approach to test for systematic biases in subjective evaluations. We exploit a setting where teachers were required to assign students both grades and rankings within each grade. Comparing students immed...Read more...
Oliver Cassagneau-Francis, Lindsey Macmillan, Richard Murphy and Gill Wyness
13 May 2026
Right-to-Buy gave tenants of local authority owned 'council' houses the chance to own their home. The policy, which began in 1980, has been criticised for increasing inequality in the housing market, but Richard Disney a...Read more...
Richard Disney and Matteo Sandi
30 July 2025
From Cambridge and Oxford to Harvard and Yale, elite universities are a feature of many education systems. Andres Barrios Fernandez, Christopher Neilson and Seth Zimmerman ask whether these institutions of higher educati...Read more...
Andres Barrios Fernandez, Christopher Neilson and Seth Zimmerman
20 June 2025
Schools in England, and the UK as a whole, need greater investment. Failure to do so puts economic growth in jeopardy as well as worsening social mobility....Read more...
Lee Elliot Major, Stephen Gibbons, Sandra McNally and Shqiponja Telhaj
1 July 2024
Online tutoring programmes have emerged as an effective strategy for narrowing the educational gaps that were exacerbated by the pandemic. Claudia Hupkau, Lucas Gortazar and Antonio Roldan-Mones outline how an eight-week...Read more...
Lucas Gortazar, Claudia Hupkau and Antonio Roldan
19 March 2024
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Lee Elliot Major, Emily Briant
6 October 2023
Andrew Eyles explains that while the government's goals in education policy have been ambitious and are to be applauded, the policies in place fall short of the targets set out as part of the broader levelling up agenda....Read more...
Andrew Eyles
26 August 2022
Girls and young women underperform in mathematics relative to their male peers - a loss of talent that may hinder productivity growth. Almudena Sevilla and Pilar Cuevas-Ruiz explain how new developments in gender economi...Read more...
Pilar Cuevas-Ruiz and Almudena Sevilla
21 June 2022
Many students still leave school without a good grasp of basic literacy, despite the negative implications for future educational and labour market outcomes. We evaluate how resources may be used within classrooms to rei...Read more...
Helen Johnson, Sandra McNally, Heather Rolfe, Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela, Robert Savage, Janet Vousden and Clare Wood
1 June 2019
This study exploits spatial anomalies in school funding policy in England to provide new evidence on the impact of resources on student achievement in urban areas. Anomalies arise because the funding allocated to Local E...Read more...
Stephen Gibbons, Sandra McNally and Martina Viarengo
1 October 2018
This paper studies how the effectiveness of teachers varies by classroom composition, combining random assignment of teachers with rich measures of teaching practices based on a popular teacher-evaluation protocol. We fi...Read more...
Esteban M. Aucejo, Patrick Coate, Jane Cooley Fruehwirth, Sean Kelly and Zachary Mozenter
24 September 2018
A significant number of people have very low levels of literacy in many OECD countries. This paper studies a national change in policy and practice in England that refocused the teaching of reading around "synthetic phon...Read more...
Stephen Machin, Sandra McNally and Martina Viarengo
1 May 2018
We estimate the effect of peers' prior achievement on student progress in secondary school, using administrative data on four cohorts of students in England. Students leaving primary for secondary school experience a big...Read more...
Stephen Gibbons and Shqiponja Telhaj
1 August 2016
The tracking of pupils by ability into elite and non-elite schools represents a controversial policy in many countries. There is no consensus on how large the elite track should be and little agreement on the effects of ...Read more...
Nina Guyon, Eric Maurin and Sandra McNally
1 June 2012
We study ability peer effects in English secondary schools using data on four cohorts of students taking age-14 national tests and measuring peers' ability by prior achievements at age 11. Our identification is based on ...Read more...
Victor Lavy, Olmo Silva and Felix Weinhardt
1 April 2012
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 government...Read more...
Helena Holmlund, Sandra McNally and Martina Viarengo
1 December 2010
In countries like the UK and the US, a significant and challenging problem facing educators is how to ensure that future generations do not suffer from the severe basic skills problems that currently hinder a sizeable gr...Read more...
Stephen Machin and Sandra McNally
1 June 2008
Despite its high relevance to current policy debates, estimating the causal effect of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) investment on educational standards remains fraught with difficulties. We exploit a cha...Read more...
Stephen Machin, Sandra McNally and Olmo Silva
1 July 2007
