This paper – a companion to Iain Crawford's and my earlier evidence to the SelectCommittee (Barr, 2002a,b,c,d,e; Crawford, 2002) – offers a strongly supportive assessmentof the strategy in the White Paper (Department for Education and Skills, 2003).[...]

This paper puts forward a strategy for achieving two objectives in higher education –improved access and increased quality – about which there is unanimous agreement.[...]

During the last two decades West Bengal has led the rest of the country with regard to agricultural performance andimplementation of panchayat institutions. But these developments have begun to level out. At the same time the state hasfallen behind in other sectors – industry, higher education...

A review of research evidence suggests that low levels of educationalattainment are crucial in generating and sustaining social exclusion. Testscores at school are the most effective predictor of many adult outcomes.School attendance and soft skills are also important. Reviewing the...

Early modern naturalists were faced with what has been termedthe ‘first bio-information crisis’. A key figure in resolving this crisiswas the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1788). Thispaper will focus on Linnaeus’s day-to-day working routines on thebasis of manuscript material held...

Large companies are usually organized into business units, yet some activitiesare almost always centralized in a company-wide functional unit. We firstshow that organizations endogenously create an incentive conflict between functionalmanagers (who desire excessive standardization) and...

Earnings inequality has increased substantially since the 1970s. Using evidence changes from con…dential Census data on U.S. law offices on lawyers'organization and earnings, we study the extent to which the mechanism suggested by Lucas (1978) and Rosen (1982), a scale of operations effect...

We present a theoretical framework and empirical strategy to measure the causal effect ofinterim feedback on individuals’ performance. Our identification strategy exploits a naturalexperiment in a leading UK university where different departments have historically differentrules on the...

Area-based polices have become a significant part of the new LabourGovernment’s approach to tackling social exclusion. This paper reviewsthe long-running debate about whether area-based policies can make asignificant impact on poverty and social exclusion. There is a strongtradition of...

This report is a summary of a joint CASE/DSS workshop that discussed indicators tomonitor the GovernmentÕs strategy to tackle poverty and social exclusion. Held on19 July 2000, the day was comprised of a series of talks from academics, people fromnon-governmental organisations and officials,...