The conflicting evidence over class size effects drawn from observational (or correlational) studies on academic achievement or labor market outcomes has provoked great debate in both academic and public policy arenas. The recent experimental evidence from the United States due to the Project...

We use predictive modelling to identify students at risk of not completing their first-year courses and not returning to university in the second year. Our aim is two-fold. Firstly, we want to understand the pathways that lead to unsuccessful first-year experiences at university. Secondly, we...

In the early 1990s, New Zealand cut benefits and tightened eligibility criteria under its main social welfare programmes. These benefit changes varied substantially across both time and demographic groups. Synthetic panel data are used econometrically to isolate the effects of these reforms on...

New Zealand panel data, which provide extensive information on the benefit histories of parents and their children, are used to estimate an intergenerational correlation coefficient in social welfare dependency. Recent estimation techniques for addressing issues of measurement error are applied...