Small business activity and female entrepreneurship have become increasingly important features of the UK economy since the start of the Great Recession. In this paper, we re-examine the impact of liquidity constraints on new business formation in an instrumental variables framework, using a...

Is unemployment the overwhelming determinant of domestic violence that many commentators expect it to be? The contribution of this paper is to examine, theoretically and empirically, how changes in unemployment affect the incidence of domestic abuse. The key theoretical prediction is that male...

This paper considers labor market adjustments following a large import shock in the German clothing industry caused by the phasing out of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement. Using the German shoe industry as a control group and administrative data, we study adjustments on the individual and firm level...

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany experienced an unprecedented temporary drop in fertility driven by economic uncertainty. Using various educational measures, we show that the children born during this nativity slump perform worse from an early age onwards. Consistent with negative...

Do applicants to higher education rely on expert judgement about the quality of the course when applying? Using application data across UK universities over a period of 8 years, we investigate how league tables affect prospective students' application decisions. We use subject specific ranking...

This paper examines a quasi-experiment in which we encourage student effort by setting various weekly incentives to engage in online tests. Our identification strategy exploits i) weekly variation in incentives to determine their impact on student effort, and ii) controlled cross-group variation...

This paper estimates the financial returns to higher education quality in the UK. To account for the selectivity of students to institution, we rely on a selection on observable assumptions. We use several estimates including the Generalised Propensity Score of Hirano and Imbens, which relies on...

Research on employers' hiring discrimination is limited by the unlawfulness of such activity. Consequently, researchers have focused on the intention to hire. Instead, we rely on a virtual labour market, the Fantasy Football Premier League, where employers can freely exercise their taste for...

We explore the link between parental selection and criminality of children in a new context. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, East Germany experienced a very large, but temporary, drop in birth rates mostly driven by economic uncertainty. We exploit this natural experiment in a...

We study the impact of labour turnover on labour productivity using a panel dataset of 347 shops belonging to a large UK clothing retailer over1995-1999. For the within-shop link – holding constant the shop’s permanent characteristics – we observe an inverted U-shape effect of labour...