It is well known that children growing up in poor families leave school with considerably lower qualifications than children from better off backgrounds. Using a simple decomposition analysis, we show that around two thirds of the socio-economic gap in attainment at age 16 can be accounted for...

This paper shows that there are large differences in cognitive and socio-emotional development between children from rich and poor backgrounds at the age of 3, and that this gap widens by the age of 5. Children from poor backgrounds also face much less advantageous "early childhood caring...

This paper uses tax and student loan administrative data to measure how the earnings of English graduates around 10 years into the labour market vary with gender, institution attended subject and socioeconomic background. The English system is competitive to enter, with some universities...

We assess the degree of consumption smoothing implicit in a calibrated life-cycle version of the standard incomplete-markets model, and we compare it to the empirical estimates of Blundell et al. (2008) (BPP hereafter). We find that households in the model have access to less...

How sensitive are the earnings of top earners to business cycles? And, how does the business cycle sensitivity of top earners vary by industry? We use a confidential dataset on earnings histories of US males from the Social Security Administration. On average, individuals in the top 1% of the...