We offer an extensive summary and a critical discussion of the empirical literature on the impact of human capital on macro-economic performance, with a particular focus on UK policy. We also highlight methodological issues and make recommendations for future research priorities. Copyright...

We use UK administrative data to estimate the differential in labour market outcomes between Ethnic Minority benefit claimants and otherwise identical Whites. In many cases, Minorities and Whites are simply too different for satisfactory estimates to be calculated and results are sensitive to...

We consider the identification and estimation of the average wage return to attaining educational qualifications when attainment is potentially measured with error. By exploiting two independent measures of qualifications, we identify the extent of misclassification in administrative and...

One of the most powerful critiques of the use of randomised experiments in the social sciences is the possibility that individuals might react to the randomisation itself, thereby rendering the causal inference from the experiment irrelevant for policy purposes. In this paper we set out a...

The low unemployment rates traditionally enjoyed by Sweden have often been attributed to the country's extensive system of active labour market programmes, which have thus frequently been regarded as a model for other countries to emulate. However, unemployment grew enormously in Sweden when the...

The paper evaluates the differential performance of the six main types of Swedish programmes that were available to adult unemployed workers en Titled to unemployment benefits in the 1990s: labour market training, workplace introduction, work experience placement, relief work, trainee...

The idea of positive educational externalities is that the benefits of individually acquired education may not be restricted to the individual but might spill over to others as well, accruing at higher aggregation levels, in particular at the macro-economic one. We offer an extensive summary and...