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 measure. Our findings suggest a positive return to university quality with an...

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 native English speakers at the end of primary school. We show that the negative...

Theories about neighbours' influence on children based on social capital, cohesion and disorganisation stress the importance of neighbourhood stability. However, amongst the vast number of studies on the effect of neighbours on a child's education, none has tested whether neighbourhood stability...

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’ misperception of their own and other’s ability, thereby increasing the expected costs to studying. Among high school...

We provide estimates for the effect of attending a Faith school on educational achievement using a census of primary school pupils in England. We argue that there are no credible instruments for Faith school attendance in this context. Instead, we partially control for selection into religious...

Improving the educational attainment of disadvantaged students in urban schools is a priority for policy worldwide, but existing research is equivocal about the effectiveness of additional funding for achieving this objective. This study exploits anomalies in the spatial dimension of school...

We estimate the effect of neighbours' characteristics and prior achievements on teenage students' educational and behavioural outcomes using census data on several cohorts of secondary school students in England. Our research design is based on changes in neighbourhood composition caused...

Many OECD countries have implemented policies to induce couples to share parental leave. This paper investigates how responsive intra-household leave-sharing is to changes in economic incentives. To investigate this fundamental question, we are forced to look at one of the Nordic countries which...

As evidence is accumulating that subjective expectations influence behavior and that these expectations are sometimes biased, it becomes policy-relevant to know how to influence individuals' expectations. Information in the media is likely to affect how people picture the future. This paper...

For various reasons the relationship between age and productivity is a matter of policy concern. I present new empirical research showing how productivity is affected by age. I study age effects at the individual level by analyzing data on running and publishing in economic journals. Furthermore...