We study a model where student effort and talent interact with parental and teachers’ investments, as well as with school system resources. The model is rich, yet sufficiently stylized to provide novel implications. We can show, for example, that an improvement in parental outside options will reduce parental and school effort, which are partially compensated through school resources. In this w...

Urban Density and Pupil Attainment We explore the association between urban density and pupil attainment using three cohorts of pupils in schooling in England. Although – as widely recognised – attainment in dense urban places is low on average, this is not because urban environments disadvantage pupils, but because the most disadvantaged pupils with low average attainments attend the most urba...

Peers, Neighborhoods and Immigrant Student Achievement: Evidence from a Placement Policy Immigrants typically perform worse than other students in the OECD countries. We examine to what extent this is due to the population characteristics of the neighborhoods that immigrants grow up in. We address this issue using a governmental refugee placement policy which provides exogenous variation in the...

How Large an Effect Can We Expect from School Reforms? Judging the success of school reform requires an interpretative context in which to judge whether effects obtained are large enough to be important or so small as to be a disappointment. The logic of school reform suggests two frameworks with which to judge the importance of effects. One is the size of the existing achievement gaps between ...

We consider the priority-based allocation problem: there is a set of indivisible objects with multiple supplies (e.g., schools with seats) and a set of agents (e.g., students) with priorities over objects (e.g., proximity of residence area). We study two well-known and competing mechanisms. The agentoptimal stable mechanism (AOSM) allots objects via the deferred acceptance algorithm. The top tr...

Estimates of intergenerational economic mobility that use point in time measures of income and earnings suffer from lifecycle and attenuation bias. We consider these issues for the National Child Development Study (NCDS) and British Cohort Study (BCS) for the first time, highlighting how common methods used to deal with these biases do not eradicate these issues. To attempt to overcome this, we...

This paper examines the implications of human capital risk for the relationship between inequality and economic development. It argues that due to missing insurance markets for human capital risk, the initial distribution of family wealth may play an important role for an economy’s process of development fueled by human capital accumulation. The analysis suggests that, in the absence of credit ...

The College Wage Premium, Overeducation, and the Expansion of Higher Education in the UK This paper provides findings from the UK Labour Force Surveys from 1996 to 2003 on the financial private returns to a degree – the “college premium”. The data covers a decade when the university participation rate doubled – yet we find no significant evidence that the mean return to a degree dropped in resp...

Highly imbalanced sex ratios suggest that Asian families prefer sons. This preference may be expressed as reduction in parental investment in daughters when a younger son is born. This study investigates the gender effect of a younger sibling on older daughter's schooling. We construct a unique dataset linking national administrative data on college entrance examinations (CET) to birth registry...

The Short-Term Effectiveness of a Remedial Mathematics Course: Evidence from a UK University Whilst in the US there is a growing debate about the effectiveness of remedial university courses, this issue is less questioned in the UK. Using a regression discontinuity approach and data from a large School of a post-1992 UK university, we estimate the effect of remediation on student outcomes. We f...