We consider the influence that mobile pupils have on the academic achievements of other pupils in English primary schools. We find that immobile pupils in year-groups (à la US “grades”) that experience high pupil entry rates progress less well academically between ages 8 and 11 than pupils...

Labor market institutions, via their effect on the wage structure, affect the investment decisions of firms in labor markets with frictions. This observation helps explain rising wage inequality in the US, but a relatively stable wage structure in Europe in the 1980s. These different trends are...

There has been a growing literature in both the US (for example Haurin and Brasington 1996, and Black 1999) and the UK (for example Gibbons & Machin, 2003) that estimates the way in which school quality is capitalised into house prices. Cheshire and Sheppard 1995 and 1999 estimated hedonic...

This paper presents an analysis of the determinant of school participation in rural north India, based on a recent household survey which includes detailed information on school characteristics. School participation especially among girls, responds to a wide range of variables, including...

We use a natural experiment to show that the presence of an external examiner has both a direct and an indirect negative effect on the performance of monitored classes in standardized educational tests. The direct effect is the difference in the test performance between classes of the same...

This paper investigates the relationship between infation uncertainty and investment using a panel of loan-level data from small businesses. Micro-level data makes it possible to study phenomena that are obscured in country or industry aggregates. The data show that periods of increased...

This paper shows that, with (partial) irreversibility, higher uncertainty reduces the impact effect of demand shocks on investment. Uncertainty increases real option values making firms more cautious when investing or disinvesting. This is confirmed both numerically for a model with a rich mix...

Uncertainty appears to vary strongly over time, temporarily rising by up to 200% around major shocks like the Cuban Missile crisis, the assassination of JFK and 9/11. This paper offers the first structural framework to analyze uncertainty shocks. I build a model with a time varying second...

This paper documents the delayed adoption of a major technological innovation: the adoption of the diesel locomotive in the US railway industry. Contrary to other instances of major technological innovations, the delay in the adoption of the diesel locomotive was not associated with an initial...

In a general equilibrium product-cycle model, lower trade barriers in-crease Southern purchasing power, which lifts long-run growth by increasing the profit from innovation. In the short run, factors of production must be reallocated inside firms, which lowers the opportunity cost of innovation,...