We provide first evidence that temporal variations in the expected returns to crime affect the location of property crime. Our identification strategy relies on the widely-held perception in the UK that households of South Asian descent store gold jewellery at home. Price movements on the...

This paper studies the impact of immigration on public policy setting. As a natural experiment, we exploit the sudden arrival of eight million forced migrants in West Germany after World War II. These migrants were on average poorer than the West German population, but unlike most international...

One of the most consistent findings in studies of electoral behaviour is that individuals with higher education have a greater propensity to vote. The nature of this relationship is much debated, with US studies generally finding evidence of a causal relationship, while European studies...

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...

One theory for why there is a strong education gradient in health outcomes is that more educated individuals more quickly absorb new information about health technology. The MMR controversy in the UK provides a case where, for a brief period of time, some highly publicized research suggested...

Policy makers generally advocate that to remain competitive countries need to train more scientists. Employers regularly complain of qualified scientist shortages blaming the higher wages in other occupations for luring graduates out of scientific occupations. Using a survey of recent British...

Using a survey of a cohort of UK graduates, linked to administrative data on higher education participation, this paper investigates the labour market attainment of recent graduates by subject of study. We document a large heterogeneity in the mean wages of graduates from different subjects and...

We study the impact of higher education financing on the academic aspirations of teenagers and of their parents. We exploit a reform which introduced a large increase in the maximum university tuition fees and a more redistributive student loan system, both of which varied across the UK's...