Education is often regarded as a route to social mobility. For this to be the case, however, the link between family background and adult outcomes must be broken (or at least reduced) once we take account of an individual's education history. This paper focuses on individuals who have completed...

Children born at the end of the academic year have lower educational attainment, on average, than those born at the start of the academic year. Previous research has shown that the difference is most pronounced early in pupils' school lives, but remains evident and statistically significant in...

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...

This paper uses individual data on employment and wages to shed light on the UK's productivity puzzle. It finds that workforce composition cannot explain the reduction in wages and hence productivity that we observe; instead, real wages have fallen significantly within jobs. Why? One possibility...

Greater levels of social mobility are widely seen as desirable on grounds of both equity and efficiency. Debate on social mobility in Britain and elsewhere has recently focused on specific factors that might hinder social mobility, including the role of internships and similar employment...

Even in OECD countries, where an increasing proportion of the workforce has a university degree, the value of basic skills in literacy and numeracy remains high. Indeed, in some countries the return for such skills, in the form of higher wages, is sufficiently large to suggest that they are in...

This paper compares survey based labour earnings data for English graduates, taken from the UK's Labour Force Survey (LFS), with the UK Government administrative sources of official individual level earnings data. This type of administrative data has few sample selection issues, is substantially...