In this paper I consider the impact of attending a selective high school in the UK. Students are assigned to these schools on the basis of a test taken in primary school and, using data on these assignment test scores for a particular district, I exploit this rule to estimate the causal effects...

Over the past 30 years, participation in Further Education (FE) in England has been markedly counter-cyclical. What is more, it has yet to increase beyond the peak of 70% reached in 1993, much to the concern of policy-makers. An obvious explanation for these facts is the availability of labour...

For much of the 20th century, British students were tracked into higher-track (for the "top" 20%) or lower-track (for the rest) secondary schools. Opponents of tracking contend that the lower-track schools in these systems will inevitably provide low-quality education. In this paper I examine...

We show that Progress 8 is a reliable measure of school effectiveness and that parents often do not apply to their most effective local school.

We use a new empirical strategy to test various measures of school effectiveness in England. Our approach exploits discontinuities in attendance probabilities that occur at unpredictable distance cutoffs used as tiebreakers in admissions processes for oversubscribed schools. We show that raw,...

This paper assesses the potential of ?workplace training? with reference to German Apprenticeship. When occupational matching is important, we derive conditions under which firms provide ?optimal? training packages. Since the German system broadly meets these conditions, we evaluate the...

Over the past 30 years, participation in Further Education (FE) in England has been markedly counter-cyclical. What is more, it has yet to increase beyond the peak of 70% reached in 1993, much to the concern of policy-makers. An obvious explanation for these facts is the availability of labour...

In this paper I consider the impact of attending a selective high school in the UK. Students are assigned to these schools on the basis of a test taken in primary school and, using data on these assignment test scores for a particular district, I exploit this rule to estimate the causal effects...

This paper estimates the impact of elite school attendance on long- run outcomes including completed education, income and fertility. Our data consists of individuals born in the 1950s and educated in a UK dis- trict that assigned students to either elite or non-elite secondary schools. Using...