Results

Journal article

Journal of Policy Modeling:

Social policy gone bad educationally: unintended peer effects from transferred students

What is the impact of an increase of lower-ability students in a university class? We examine a natural experiment in which students from large, low-income families had the chance to transfer to academic programs at a lo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Marriage and misallocation: evidence from 70 years of US history

The traditional expectation that married women should be homemakers restricts them from pursuing their comparative advantage in the labor market. I quantify the aggregate economic consequences of these marriage-specific ...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

Young people, human capital investment and the Great Recession

Policy makers recognise the importance of encouraging young people to stay in education for longer. We use the experience of the Great Recession in England to evaluate whether the incentive to invest in human capital bea...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

The full returns to higher education in the UK

University education is known to generate significant earnings returns, but its full value may be understated without considering its wider effects on individual wellbeing. This paper estimates the complete lifetime retu...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...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

University degrees: how should we assess their value?

Evaluating university degrees on the basis of the job prospects they provide for graduates has led to some being seen as 'low value' or 'low quality'. But, in reality, their worth is hard to measure. Closing such courses...Read more...

Blog

LSE Inequalities:

The spiralling costs of higher education are hitting stay at home students harder

Since the pandemic, a new divide has emerged in higher education between commuter students, on the one hand, and on-campus students, on the other. Reporting on the findings of a new student money and wellbeing survey, Le...Read more...

Journal article

British Education Research Journal:

The path increasingly travelled: vocational entry qualifications, socioeconomic status and university outcomes

Many countries have introduced flexibility in their admissions equivalents for tertiary education, allowing students to apply with vocational rather than academic qualifications at upper secondary level. However, entrant...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Economic Papers:

Economic insecurity and political preferences

Economic insecurity has attracted growing attention, but there is no consensus as to its definition. We characterize a class of individual economic-insecurity measures based on the time profile of economic resources. We ...Read more...

Journal article

Economics of Education Review:

Gender gap variation across assessment types: explanations and implications

Using Swedish population data, we document that girls outperform boys by a third of a standard deviation in school grades, whereas a gap of similar magnitude but opposite sign persists in SAT scores in the sample of non-...Read more...

Journal article

Education Economics :

Grade expectations: how well can past performance predict future grades?

Students in the UK apply to university with teacher-predicted examination grades, rather than actual results. These predictions have been shown to be inaccurate, and to favour certain groups, leading to concerns about te...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics:

Neighbors' effects on university enrollment

This paper provides causal evidence that close neighbors signigicantly influence potential applicants' decision to attend university. I create a unique dataset combining detailed geographic information and individual edu...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Social policy gone bad educationally: unintended peer effects from transferred students

What is the impact of an increase of lower-ability students in a university class? We examine a natural experiment from Greece in which students from large, low-income families had the chance to transfer to academic prog...Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

Slack and prices during Covid-19: accounting for labor market participation

Strong labor force participation cyclicality during the Covid-19 pandemic has put further into question the capacity of standard Phillips Curve (PC) models to fully capture labor market cyclical conditions. In this paper...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

How would minimum entry grades affect opportunities in higher education?

The UK government is consulting on the introduction of minimum eligibility requirements for access to student loans. Claire Crawford and Gill Wyness argue that if such a reform is introduced, it is likely to prevent many...Read more...

Journal article

British Journal of Industrial Relations:

Introduction to symposium on the impact of employee influence

The three papers contained in this Symposium are the final products of a lengthy and fruitful research Odyssey. In retrospect, uncharacteristic almost to the point of surreal, the new incoming, post-Brexit referendum, Br...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economics and Statistics:

The welfare consequences of centralization: evidence from a quasi-natural experiment in Switzerland

Many countries are reallocating tasks and powers to more central levels of government. To identify centralization's welfare effects, I use a difference-in-differences design that relies on time and cross-cantonal variati...Read more...

Blog

Higher Education Policy Institute:

Why highly selective universities need to demystify admissions for student applicants

In light of Covid-19's impact on A-level results, Lee Elliot Major and Kieran Tompkins dispel misconceptions around university admissions, such as the number of students drawn from private and state schools at Russell Gr...Read more...

Journal article

Education Economics:

Minority report: the impact of predicted grades on university admissions of disadvantaged groups

We study the UK's university application system, in which students apply based on predicted examination grades, rather than actual results. Using three years of UK university applications data we find that only 16% of ap...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control:

Comments on "labor market trends and the changing value of time"

The last century was characterized by a well-documented marked increase in income inequality in the US (see Alvaredo et al., 2018, among many others), which fostered a vast debate among academics and policy makers about ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Economic insecurity breeds support for the right

Economic insecurity breeds support for the right Economic insecurity is attracting growing attention in social, academic, and policy circles. It has arguably risen for a number of reasons in recent years: the Great Rece...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Economic insecurity and the rise of the right

Economic insecurity has attracted growing attention in social, academic and policy circles. However, there is no consensus as to its precise definition. Intuitively, economic insecurity is multi-faceted, making any compr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Should I stay or should I go? Neighbors' effects on university enrollment

This paper investigates whether the decision to attend university depends on university enrollment of close neighbors. I create a unique dataset combining detailed geographic information and educational records from diff...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Technology Transfer:

Academic inventors: collaboration and proximity with industry

This paper addresses a number of fundamental research questions on university-industry (U-I) collaborations. Are U-I collaborations intrinsically different from other forms of collaboration, such as inter-firm or inter-u...Read more...

Journal article

Economica:

Gender inequality and economic development: fertility, education and norms

We document the evolution of gender inequality in labour market outcomes?earnings, labour supply and wage rates?over the path of economic development, and present evidence on the potential reasons for this evolution. To ...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...

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...

CentrePiece article

In brief... The rewards for getting a good degree

It pays to study hard at university, according to research by Shqiponja Telhaj and colleagues. Their study finds that there is a significant hourly wage premium for getting a first or upper second. For graduates more tha...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Review of Economic Policy:

Higher education, career opportunities, and intergenerational inequality

The UK government has expressed a desire to increase social mobility, with policies to help achieve this aim focused on reducing inequalities in educational attainment. This paper draws together established and new infor...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Graduate returns, degree class premia and higher education expansion in the UK

We investigate the extent to which graduate returns vary according to the class of degree achieved by UK university students and examine changes over time in estimated degree class premia. Using a variety of complementar...Read more...

Journal article

Economics of Education Review:

Student satisfaction, league tables and university applications: evidence from Britain

We investigate the impact of information about student satisfaction on university choice, using data from the UK's National Student Survey (NSS) and on applications to undergraduate degrees. We show that NSS scores have ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Oil: the impact on women's work

Stephan Maurer and Andrei Potlogea explore whether oil-dominated economies are naturally biased against women's labour market participation....Read more...

CEP election analysis

Paying for Higher Education

The UK Higher Education sector has changed radically as a result of Coalition Policies ? most obviously through the dramatic increase in the tuition fee cap from #3,375 to #9,000 per year. However, the greatest issue ari...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Fueling the gender gap? Oil and women's labor and marriage market outcomes

This paper analyzes the effect of resource-based economic specialization on women's labor market outcomes. Using information on the location and discovery of major oil fields in the Southern United States coupled with a ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Student Satisfaction, League Tables and University Applications

We investigate the impact of information about student satisfaction on university choice, using data from the UK?s National Student Survey (NSS) and on applications to undergraduate degree courses. We show that the NSS h...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Paying for Performance: Incentive Pay Schemes and Employees' Financial Participation

We present new comparable data on the incidence of performance pay schemes in Europe and the USA. We find that the percentage of employees exposed to incentive pay schemes ranges from around 10-15 percent in some Europea...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Measuring the (Income) Effect of Disability Insurance Generosity on Labour Market Participation

We analyze the employment effect of a law that provides for a 36 percent increase in the generosity of disability insurance (DI) for claimants who are, as a result of their lack of skills and of the labour market conditi...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

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

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 main...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Recursive Contracts

We obtain a recursive formulation for a general class of contracting problems involving incentive constraints. These constraints make the corresponding maximization (sup) problems non recursive. Our approach consists of ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Spreading the Word: Geography, Policy and Knowledge Spillovers

Using new data on citations to university patents and scientific publications, we study how geography affects university knowledge spillovers. Citations to patents decline sharply with distance up to about 150 miles and ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quality Matters - the Expulsion of Professors and Ph.D. Student Outcomes in Nazi Germany

I investigate the effect of faculty quality on Ph.D. student outcomes. To address the endogeneity of faculty quality I use exogenous variation provided by the expulsion of mathematics professors in Nazi Germany. I find t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Participation in Organisations: Economic Approaches

Under the auspices of the debate about high performance work systems, it has been suggested that the evidence of positive results is disappointing and that one reason is that there has been a lack of theory. This paper a...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

University Quality and Graduate Wages in the UK

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 mea...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Peer Effects in Science - Evidence from the Dismissal of Scientists in Nazi Germany

This paper analyzes peer effects among university scientists. Specifically, it investigates whether the number of peers and their average quality affects the productivity of researchers in physics, chemistry, and mathema...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Family Types and the Persistence of Regional Disparities in Europe

This paper examines the association between one of the most basic institutional forms, the family, and a series of demographic, educational, social, and economic indicators across regions in Europe. Using Emmanuel Todd?s...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Resurrecting the Participation Margin

This paper considers a real business cycle model with search frictions in the labor market and labor supply which is elastic along the participation margin. Previous authors have found that such models generate counterfa...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Students' academic self-perception

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 abilit...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Education Policy in the UK

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