From a unique data-set identifying the school attended prior to university for a full cohort of UK university students, we examine the determinants of final degree classification. We exploit the detailed school-level information and focus on the influence of school characteristics, such as...

The panel variant of the KPSS tests developed by Hadri (2000) for the null of stationarity suffers from size distortions in the presence of cross section dependence. However, applying the bootstrap methodology we find that these tests are approximately correctly sized.

Objectives To assess the extent to which various factors influence the probability that an individual medical student will drop out of medical school during their first year of study, focusing on the influence both of prior qualifications, such as A-level subjects taken and scores attained, and...

This paper investigates the size and power of a number of unit root tests, currently in use in both applied macro and financial economics, when the data generating process is fractionally integrated. The long persistence characteristic of fractionally integrated processes lowers the power of...

Official employment-related Performance Indicators in UK Higher Education are based on the population of students responding to the First Destination Supplement (FDS). This generates potentially biased performance indicators as this population of students is not necessarily representative of the...

We exploit a rich administrative panel data-set for cohorts of Economics students at a UK university in order to identify causal effects of class absence on student performance. We exploit the panel properties of the data to control for unobserved heterogeneity across students and hence for...

We exploit individual-level administrative data for whole populations of UK university students for the leaving cohorts of 1985-1993 to investigate the determinants of graduate occupational earnings. Among other results, we find that there are significant differences in the occupational earnings...

We exploit individual-level administrative data for whole populations of UK university students for the leaving cohorts of 1985-1993 (together with that of 1998) to investigate the influence of degree performance on graduate occupational earnings. We find that there is a significant premium...

In this paper we conduct a Monte Carlo study to determine the power of Pearson’s overall goodness-of-fit test as well as the “Pearson analog” tests (see Anderson (1994)) to detect rejections due to shifts in variance, skewness and kurtosis, as we vary the number and location of the...

Periodic models for seasonal data allow the parameters of the model to vary across the different seasons. This paper uses the components of UK consumption to see whether the periodic autoregressive (PAR) model yields more accurate forecasts than non-periodic models, such as the airline model of...