Results

Blog

LSE Politics:

Is the rise in home schooling down to mental health?

There has been a marked increase in the rates of home schooling in the UK since Covid. David Frayman and Ben Helme look into the causes behind this increase, and argue that a rise in mental health issues among young peop...Read more...

Journal article

Large-scale Assessments in Education:

Driven to succeed? Teenagers' achievement motivation, university aspirations, and performance on high-stakes examinations

There is growing interest in how young people's socio-emotional skills, particularly motivation, shape educational outcomes. Yet less is known about how adolescents' general achievement motivation and their specific aspi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Brief yet effective: group counseling and college access for disadvantaged students

Large socioeconomic gaps in higher-education access and completion persist even among similarly talented students with access to generous funding, pointing to an important role for information frictions and unequal suppo...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Youth crime and delinquency in and out of school

Ten years of idiosyncratic variation in school closure dates for all secondary schools in England are combined with administrative records of educational and criminal trajectories linked at the individual level to study ...Read more...

Journal article

Review of World Economics:

The changing structure of global value chains and technological change: evidence from the firm-level patent data

This paper explores how changes in the relative position in the Global Value Chains (GVCs) affect firms? innovation activities. The analysis combines matched patent-firm data with information on GVC networks from the OEC...Read more...

Journal article

Nature Human Behaviour:

Why single-item measures of wellbeing are best

We argue that individual wellbeing is best captured by single self-reports of one's overall quality of life. This approach is direct, efficient, globally comparable and distinguishes wellbeing from what might explain it....Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Public Economics:

The impact of subjective school ratings on principal compensation and turnover

Prior research has established that objective, test-score-based school accountability measures impact school leaders. Subjective evaluations, on the other hand, can provide a more nuanced assessment of school quality. Th...Read more...

Journal article

Economics of Education Review:

Free to improve? The impact of free school attendance in England

We evaluate the impact of attending two secondary free schools in England - new autonomous state-funded start-ups - using admission lotteries and a distance-based regression discontinuity design. We characterise each sch...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Personnel policy in public sector organizations: evidence from England's academy schools

Many governments are increasingly decentralizing the governance of public sector organizations, by granting more autonomy to their managers. At the same time, public sector managers often cannot use key personnel practic...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Human Resources:

Closing the gap between vocational and general education?

Vocational education delivery is widely debated, with ongoing efforts to improve its effectiveness. In 2010, England introduced University Technical Colleges (UTCs), hybrid institutions combining general and vocational e...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Public sector performance disclosure: salary and career outcomes for top managers and employees

Public sector organizations around the world are held to account on the basis of objective measures of performance. This paper investigates, for the first time, the impact of subjective school inspection ratings on labor...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Youth crime and delinquency in and out of school

This paper combines ten years of idiosyncratic variation in school closure dates for all secondary schools in England with administrative records of educational and criminal trajectories linked at the individual level to...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management:

Air pollution and innovation

If air pollution harms innovation - and therefore future productivity - existing assessments of its economic cost are incomplete. We estimate the effect of fine particulate matter concentration on inventive output in 977...Read more...

Blog

LSE Euro PP:

A new measure of quality of life explains why people like living in bigger cities

People like to live in certain places, even when higher wages are on offer elsewhere. Gabriel Ahlfeldt, Fabian Bald, Duncan Roth and Tobias Seidel show that once you take into account people's preferences, large cities o...Read more...

Chapter

WELLBY

in Elgar Encyclopedia of Behavioural and Experimental Economics

The WELLBY is a measure of individual subjective wellbeing, as judged by individuals themselves, capturing both the quality of life and the length of life. We outline its use for measuring social progress and for social ...Read more...

Journal article

Economics of Education Review:

De-tracking at the margin: How alternative secondary education pathways affect student attainment

This paper estimates how marginal increases in the flexibility of between-school tracking affect student attainment by exploiting the addition of non-selective `comprehensive schools? and hybrid `vocational high schools?...Read more...

Journal article

Economics of Education: An Introductory Textbook:

Gender gaps in education

International data stubbornly show that boys perform worse than girls in school and that women continue to be under-represented in university and professional careers related to STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Eng...Read more...

Journal article

Research Policy:

Who stands on the shoulders of Chinese (scientific) giants? Evidence from chemistry

China?s rise in science has the potential to push forward the knowledge frontier, but mere production of knowledge does not guarantee that others are able to build on it. We ask whether chemistry research originating fro...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Measuring quality of life under spatial frictions

Using a quantitative spatial model as a data-generating process, we explore how spatial frictions affect the measurement of quality of life. We find that under a canonical parameterization, mobility frictions - generated...Read more...

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

Absence rates will stay high until the Covid generation leaves school

School absences increased massively during the Covid-19 pandemic and remain at higher levels. Our new research (funded by the Nuffield Foundation) shows that the high level of pupil absence in England can be attributed t...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Geography:

On the productivity advantage of cities

Agglomeration externalities are the key factor explaining the existence of cities and their size. However, while the various micro foundations of agglomeration externalities stress the importance of total factor producti...Read more...

Journal article

Review of World Economics:

Curse or blessing? multinational corporations and labor market outcomes in Africa

Do multinational enterprises create local job opportunities in developing countries? We address this question in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa by combining information on domestic and foreign multinationals? affiliat...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

Accounting for trade patterns

We develop a quantitative framework for decomposing trade patterns. We derive price indexes that determine comparative advantage and the aggregate cost of living. If firms and products are imperfect substitutes, we show ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade, skills and productivity

We examine how firms adjust their production and technology in response to exogenous trade shocks. We develop a model in which revenue TFP can be distinguished from quantity TFP, and where skill upgrading is explicitly e...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The organizational economics of school chains

We use the insights of firms' organizational economics to study school chains' organization. We match information on decentralization of activities for approximately 400 chains and 2,000 schools in England to student and...Read more...

External report

A generation at risk: rebalancing education in the post-pandemic era

We present for the first time a model of children's evolving socio-emotional and cognitive skills to assess how the educational and lifetime prospects of children of different ages, genders and socio-economic backgrounds...Read more...

Journal article

Economica:

Do wages underestimate the inequality in workers' rewards? The joint distribution of job quality and wages across occupations

Information on both wages and job quality is needed in order to understand the occupational dispersion of wellbeing. We analyse subjective wellbeing in a large UK sample to construct a measure of `overall reward?, the su...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Autonomous schools, achievement and segregation

We study whether autonomous schools, which are publicly funded but can operate more independently than government-run schools, affect student achievement and school segregation across 15 countries over 16 years. Our trip...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economics and Statistics :

Class rank and long-run outcomes

This paper considers an unavoidable feature of the school environment, class rank. What are the long-run effects of a student's ordinal rank in elementary school? Using administrative data on all public-school students i...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Has financial fair play changed European football?

In 2011 UEFA, the governing body of European football, introduced the Financial Fair Play Regulation (FFPR), consisting of a set of financial restraints to be met by clubs as a prerequisite for participation to its compe...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Free to improve? The impact of free school attendance in England

We investigate the impact of attending a free school in England - that is, a new start-up school that enjoys considerable autonomy while remaining in the state sector. We analyse the effects of two secondary free schools...Read more...

Journal article

Sports Economics Review:

Has financial fair play changed European football?

In 2011 UEFA, the governing body of European football, introduced the Financial Fair Play Regulation (FFPR), consisting of a set of financial restraints to be met by clubs as a prerequisite for participation to its compe...Read more...

CentrePiece article

School qualifications and youth custody

Youth custody has severe long-term consequences for detained young people. Stephen Machin, Sandra McNally and Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela investigate the relationship between GCSE qualifications and youth custody, and find t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Who stands on the shoulders of Chinese (scientific) giants? Evidence from chemistry

China's rise in science has the potential to push forward the knowledge frontier, but mere production of knowledge does not guarantee that others are able to build on it. We ask whether chemistry research originating fro...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

School qualifications and youth custody

A very small number of young people enter youth custody between age 16 and 18 (about 4 in 1000 males), yet the consequences are severe. They spend an average of 7 months in youth custody and such incarceration has been r...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Public Economics:

Lost boys? Secondary education and crime

We study the effect of secondary education on criminal behavior of young men in Finland. We exploit admission cut-offs in over-subscribed programs and estimate the effect of gaining access to a) any secondary school vs n...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Gender stereotypes in the family

We investigate gender-stereotyped beliefs about children's academic abilities among parents. Leveraging survey and school administrative data, we document that parents underestimate girls' mathematical skills and overest...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Can grit be taught? Lessons from a nationwide field experiment with middle-school students

We study whether a particular socio-emotional skill - grit (the ability to sustain effort and interest towards long-term goals) - can be cultivated through a large-scale program, and how this affects student learning. Us...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

Why does education reduce crime?

We provide a unifying empirical framework to study why crime reductions occurred due to a sequence of state-level dropout age reforms enacted between 1980 and 2010 in the United States. Because the reforms changed the sh...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Air pollution and innovation

If air pollution harms innovation -- and therefore future productivity -- existing assessments of its economic cost are incomplete. We estimate the effect of fine particulate matter concentration on inventive output in 1...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

From immediate acceptance to deferred acceptance: effects on school admissions and achievement in England

Countries and cities around the world increasingly rely on centralized systems to assign students to schools. Two algorithms, deferred acceptance (DA) and immediate acceptance (IA), are widespread. The latter is often cr...Read more...

Journal article

The Journal of Human Resources:

STEM graduates and secondary school curriculum: does early exposure to science matter?

This paper explores the effect of strengthening the science curriculum in secondary school on STEM university education. By exploiting the staggered implementation of a reform that encouraged secondary schools in England...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance:

The effects of parental job loss on children's outcomes

Severe economic downturns are typically characterized by a high incidence of job losses. The available evidence suggests that job losers suffer short-run earning losses that persist in the long run, are more likely to re...Read more...

Journal article

China Economic Review:

Compensating for academic loss: online learning and student performance during the Covid-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to widespread school shutdowns, with many continuing distance education via online-learning platforms. We here estimate the causal effects of online education on student exam performance usi...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

Job quality and workplace gender diversity in Europe

We here consider the relationship between workplace gender measures and employees? perceived job quality, where the former cover both the gender mix of workers with the same job title and the gender of the immediate boss...Read more...

Journal article

Economics of Education Review:

It's time to learn: school institutions and returns to instruction time

This paper investigates whether the effects of a reform that substantially increased daily instruction time in Chilean primary schools vary depending on school institutions. Focusing on incumbent students and exploiting ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quality of life in a dynamic spatial model

We develop a dynamic spatial model in which heterogeneous workers are imperfectly mobile and forward-looking and yet all structural fundamentals can be inverted without assuming that the economy is in a stationary spatia...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

School indiscipline and crime

This paper studies the impact of compulsory schooling on violent behaviour and victimization in school using individual-level administrative data matching education and criminal records from Queensland (Australia). Explo...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

Closing the Gap Between Vocational and General Education? Evidence from University Technical Colleges in England

Some countries, notably those which have long had a weak history of vocational education like the UK and the US, have recently seen a rapid expansion of hybrid schools which provide both general and vocational education....Read more...

Journal article

Early Childhood Research Quarterly:

The when and what of measuring ECE quality: analysis of variation in the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) across the ECE day

Observational assessment has become an integral component of the quality improvement agenda in Early Care and Education (ECE) and has been significant in directing attention to quality of interactions within the ECE sett...Read more...

Journal article

SERIEs:

Job loss at home: children's school performance during the Great Recession

This paper studies the intergenerational impact of parental job loss on school performance during the Great Recession in Spain. Collecting data through parental surveys in a school in the province of Barcelona, I obtain ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Parental well-being in times of Covid-19 in Germany

We examine the differential effects of Covid-19 and related restrictions on individuals with dependent children in Germany. We specifically focus on the role of school and day care center closures, which may be regarded ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Better together? Heterogeneous effects of tracking on student achievement

I study the effects of early between-school ability tracking on student achievement, exploiting institutional differences between German federal states. In all states, about 40% of students transition to separate academi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Disrupted schooling: impacts on achievement from the Chilean school occupations

Disrupted schooling can heavily impact the amount of education pupils receive. Starting in early June of 2011 a huge social outburst of pupil protests, walk-outs, riots and school occupations called the Chilean Winter ca...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Covid-19 school shutdowns: what will they do to our children's education?

Evidence from unexpected temporary school closures and reduced instruction time suggests school closures will reduce educational achievement, both in the short and long term. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds are ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

On the productivity advantage of cities

Ever since Marshall (1890) agglomeration externalities have been viewed as the key factor explaining the existence of cities and their size. However, while the various micro foundations of agglomeration externalities str...Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

Intergenerational effects of employment protection reforms

Job insecurity has worsened in most OECD countries in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Using Labour Force Survey data, I estimate the link between parental job insecurity (as measured by the contract type held by pa...Read more...

Journal article

Management Science:

What you don't know. . .can't hurt you? A natural field experiment on relative performance feedback in higher education

This paper studies the effect of providing feedback to college students on their position in the grade distribution by using a natural field experiment. This information was updated every six months during a three-year p...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Widening the high school curriculum to include soft skill training: impacts on health, behaviour, emotional wellbeing and occupational aspirations

From 2020 the health and relationships aspects of Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education will be compulsory in UK schools for adolescents. However less is known about how it can be taught in an effective manner....Read more...

Journal article

SSM - Population Health:

Crime victimisation over time and sleep quality

We here consider the relationship between the individual time profile of crime victimisation and sleep quality. Sleep quality worsens with contemporaneous crime victimisation, with physical violence having a larger effec...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Fiscal and education spillovers from charter school expansion

The fiscal and educational consequences of charter expansion for non-charter students are central issues in the debate over charter schools. Do charter schools drain resources and high-achieving peers from non-charter sc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Why does education reduce crime?

Prior research shows reduced criminality to be a beneficial consequence of education policies that raise the school leaving age. This paper studies how crime reductions occurred in a sequence of state-level dropout age r...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Managing trade: evidence from China and the US

We study how management practices shape export performance using matched production-trade-management data for Chinese and American firms and a randomized control trial in India. Better managed firms are more likely to ex...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Nursery attendance and children's outcomes

The UK government has expanded the popular `free entitlement? to part-time early education and care from a universal 15 hours per week to 30 hours per week for working parents. But research by Jo Blanden and co-authors r...Read more...

Journal article

Economics of Education Review:

Smart but unhappy: independent-school competition and the wellbeing-efficiency trade-off in education

We study whether independent-school competition involves a trade-off between pupil wellbeing and academic performance. To test this hypothesis, we analyse data covering pupils across the OECD, exploiting historical Catho...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Aggregating from micro to macro patterns of trade

We develop a new framework for aggregating from micro to macro patterns of trade. We derive price indexes that determine comparative advantage across countries and sectors and the aggregate cost of living. If firms and p...Read more...

External report

The impact of academies on educational outcomes - the Education Policy Institute

The expansion of the academies programme has been one of the biggest changes to the English education system in a generation. 3.4 million children are now taught in either a sponsored or a converter academy. Those childr...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Adjusting your dreams? High school plans and dropout behaviour

At the end of middle school, many low-achieving students realise that they do not have the ability to get into selective high school programmes, which may be a source of disengagement and eventually lead them to drop out...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The hospital as a multi-product firm: the effect of hospital competition on value-added indicators of clinical quality

There is increasing international interest in using Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) to assess health care provider performance. PROMs are a fundamental advance on existing indicators of health care quality in t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

What?s in a name? Expectations, heuristics and choice during a period of radical school reform

Education policy worldwide has sought to incentivize school improvement and facilitate pupil-school matching by introducing reforms that promote autonomy and choice. Understanding the way in which families form preferenc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Teacher quality, test scores and non-cognitive skills: evidence from primary school teachers in the UK

Schooling can produce both cognitive and non-cognitive skills, both of which are important determinants of adult outcomes. Using very rich data from a UK birth cohort study, I estimate teacher value added (VA) models for...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Multi-product firms and product quality

We examine the global operations of multi-product firms. We present a flexible heterogeneous-firm trade model with either limited or strong scope for quality differentiation. Using customs data for China during 2002-2006...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quality in early years settings and children?s school achievement

Childcare quality is often thought to be important for influencing children?s subsequent attainment at school. The English Government regulates the quality of early education by setting minimum levels of qualifications f...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Are you happy while you work?

Using a new data source permitting individuals to record their well-being via a smartphone, we explore within-person variance in individuals? well-being measured momentarily at random points in time. We find paid work is...Read more...

Journal article

IZA Journal of Labor & Development:

Pathways from school to work in the developing world

This paper uses novel micro data from the ILO-STWT surveys to provide evidence on the duration, endpoint, and determinants of the transition from school to work in a sample of 23 low- and middle-income countries around t...Read more...

Journal article

IZA Journal of Labor and Development:

Pathways from school to work in the developing world

This paper uses novel micro data from the ILO-STWT surveys to provide evidence on the duration, endpoint, and determinants of the transition from school to work in a sample of 23 low- and middle-income countries around t...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Studying science: the impact of school curriculum on degree choice

An educational reform in England in 2004 that entitled higher ability school students to take the so-called `triple science?course contributed a third of the increased share of STEM graduates in England 2005-10. That is ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

Multi-product firms and product quality

We examine the global operations of multi-product firms. We present a flexible heterogeneous-firm trade model with either limited or strong scope for quality differentiation. Using customs data for China during 2002?2006...Read more...

Blog

ESRC blog:

The `photo-finish effect?: when third place winners are happier than second

Laura Kudrna, a London School of Economics scholarship PhD candidate, researches the effects of achievement on happiness, particularly focusing on examples of when greater success ? be it financial, academic, romantic, o...Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

School reforms and pupil performance

The relationship between school reforms, specifically those involving the introduction of new school types, and pupil performance is studied. The particular context is the introduction of academy schools in England, but ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

STEM graduates and secondary school curriculum: does early exposure to science matter?

Increasing the number of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) university graduates is considered a key element for long-term productivity and competitiveness in the global economy. Still, little is known abou...Read more...

Journal article

The Scandinavian Journal of Economics:

Valuing school quality via a school choice reform

Among policymakers, educators, and economists, there remains a strong debate on the extent to which good schools matter. In this paper, we estimate school quality valuations based upon house prices, by considering a poli...Read more...

Journal article

Annals of economics and statistics:

Childhood sporting activities and adult labour-market outcomes

We here ask whether childhood sport participation is positively correlated with adult labour-market outcomes. There are many potential channels for this effect, although, as usual, identifying a causal relationship is di...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Parental job loss: the impact on children's school performance

Unemployment is bad news not just for the individuals who lose their jobs but also for their families. Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela examines this underemphasised cost of economic downturns by measuring the impact of parental ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Making a difference in education

A new book by Sandra McNally and colleagues surveys the evidence on which policies and practices are working in UK schools....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Job loss at home: children's school performance during the great recession in Spain

This paper studies the effect of parental job loss on children's school performance during the Great Recession in Spain, using an original panel dataset for students observed since the beginning of the crisis in a school...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Educational efficiency: value for money in public spending on schools

Which national education systems deliver the best value for money? Peter Dolton and colleagues rank 30 of the world?s richest countries based on their expenditure on teacher costs (which account for 80% of education budg...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Benford's law, families of distributions and a test basis

Benford's Law is used to test for data irregularities. While novel, there are two weaknesses in the current methodology. First, test values used in practice are too conservative and the test values of this paper are more...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Does management matter in schools?

Better school management is associated with better pupil achievement, according to CEP analysis of the quality of management practices in schools in a range of developed and developing countries. Renata Lemos notes that ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Impact of Better School Accessibility on Student outcomes

This paper identifies and quantifies the effects of better transport accessibility on student performance measured by mathematics test scores. A 27 km new subway line and the extension of an existing line in Santiago (Ch...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Childhood sporting activities and adult labour-market outcomes

We here ask whether sports participation at school is positively correlated with adult labour-market outcomes. There are many potential channels for this effect, although, as usual, identifying a causal relationship is d...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Does school spending matter?

Increases in resources for schools are typically more effective in disadvantaged schools and for disadvantaged pupils. That is one of the many findings of a review by Steve Gibbons and Sandra McNally of the research evid...Read more...

Journal article

Educational Research:

Educational attainment across the UK nations: performance, inequality and evidence

Political devolution occurred in the UK in 1998-99, following many years in which some degree of policy administration had been devolved to the four nations. Since devolution, all four countries of the UK have pursued in...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The effects of resources across school phases: a summary of recent evidence

This report provides an overview and discussion of the past decade of academic evidence on the causal effects of resources in schooling on students? outcomes. Early evidence lacked good strategies for estimating the effe...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

Valuing school quality using boundary discontinuities

Existing research shows that house prices respond to local school quality as measured by average test scores. However, higher test scores could signal higher academic value-added or higher ability, more sought-after inta...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Human Capital, Matching and Job Satisfaction

Using a model of wage determination developed by Stevens (2003) we offer an explanation of why tenure has a negative effect when entered in job satisfaction equations. If job satisfaction measures match quality, then the...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Language barriers? The impact of non-native English speakers in the classroom

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 nativ...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

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

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 ins...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Determinants of Intrafirm Trade: Evidence from French Firms

How well does the theory of the firm explain the choice between intrafirm and arms' length trade? This paper uses firm-level import data from France to look into this question. We find support for three key predictions o...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Valuing School Quality Using Boundary Discontinuities

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, ...Read more...