Choice and competition in education have recently found growing support from both policymakers and academics. Yet evidence on the actual benefits of market-orientated reforms is at best mixed. Moreover, although the economic rationale for choice and competition is clear, in existing work there...

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 intakes. In our research, we show that both school value-added and student prior...

In this Chapter, we critically review the sizable literature that values school quality and performance through housing valuations. While highly variable in terms of research quality, the literature consistently finds housing valuations to be significantly higher in places where measured school...

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...

We study the link between self-employment and some salient aspects of entrepreneurship – namely business creation and innovation – in urban and rural labour markets. In order to do so, we combine individual and firm-level data for Britain aggregated at the Travel-to-Work Area level. We find...

We study an education intervention targeting underachieving pupils’ noncognitive skills with the aim of improving attendance and cognitive outcomes. We evaluate the policy effect on test scores in national exams at age 16 exploiting repeated observations to control for unobservables. We find...

We document that the fraction of entrepreneurs who work in the region where they were born is significantly higher than the corresponding fraction for dependent workers. This difference is more pronounced in more developed regions and positively related to the degree of local financial...

We document that the fraction of entrepreneurs working in the region where they were born is significantly higher than the corresponding fraction for dependent workers. This is more pronounced in more developed regions and positively related to the degree of local financial development. Firms...