The magnitude and characteristics of the effect of a child’s peers on their outcomes has long interested researchers and policy makers. In this paper, I take advantage of the correlation between the average outcomes a child’s peer group attains with the distribution of ages within the cohort...

This paper presents the first estimates of the causal effect of facilities for prenatal sex diagnosis on the sex ratio at birth in India. It conducts a triple difference analysis across cohort, birth order and sex of previous births. Treated births are those that occur after prenatal sex...

In 1997 the new Labour government in the UK inherited a situation where nearly one in 5 children lived in a household where no adult worked and around one in 3 lived in relative poverty. Children had replaced pensioners as the poorest group in society. The incoming government set about an...

In this paper we use the ALSPAC cohort of 12,000 births to examine the effect of maternity rights on mothers' post-birth return to employment decisions. We aim to disentangle the effects of the terms of maternity rights entitlements from the effects of other factors (such as household wealth,...

The UK welfare system has undergone three very profound periods of reform of the post-war model laid down by Beveridge. The first was a move in the direction of (but never fully converged with) the Bismarkian model of a contributory social insurance model with time limited earnings related...

The effect of a more able peer group on a child’s attainment is considered an integral part in estimating a pupil level educational production function. Examinations in England at age 16 are tiered according to ability, leading to a large stratification of pupils by ability. However, within...

Instrumental variables analysis using genetic markers as instruments is now a widely used technique in epidemiology and biostatistics. As single markers tend to explain only a small proportion of phenotypical variation, there is increasing interest in using multiple genetic markers to obtain...

Instrumental variables (IVs) can be used to construct estimators of exposure effects on the outcomes of studies affected by non-ignorable selection of the exposure. Estimators which fail to adjust for the effects of non-ignorable selection will be biased and inconsistent. Such situations...

This article considers a wide class of censoring problems and presents a construction rule for an objective function. This objective function generalises the orginary likelihood as well as particular "likelihoods" used for estimation in several censoring models. Under regularity conditions the...

The most widely used measure of segregation is the dissimilarity index, D. It is now well understood that this measure also reflects randomness in the allocation of individuals to units; that is, it measures deviations from evenness not deviations from randomness. This leads to potentially large...