There is considerable disagreement in the academic literature about whether raising school expenditure improves educational outcomes. Yet changing the level of resources is one of the key policy levers open to governments. In the UK, school expenditure has increased by about 40 per cent in real...

This paper investigates the robustness of recent findings on the effect of parental background on child health. We are particularly concerned with the extent to which their finding that income effects on child health are the result of spurious correlation rather than some causal mechanism. A...

In this paper we analyse the role of wage expectations in an empirical model of incomplete spells of unemployment and reservation wages. To be specific, we model the duration of unemployment, reservation wages and expected wages simultaneously for a sample of individuals who are not in work,...

This paper extends the existing literature on FDI and wage inequality. We do this in two ways. Firstly, we incorporate more precise measures of inward investment into the model, by allowing for differences in the effects between horizontal and vertical FDI. Secondly, after establishing the...

The generalized entropy class of inequality indices is derived for Generalized Beta of the Second Kind (GB2) income distributions, thereby providing a full range of top-sensitive and bottom-sensitive measures. An examination of British income inequality in 1994/95 and 2004/05 illustrates the...

Despite being central to government education policy in many countries, there remains considerable debate about whether resources matter for pupil outcomes. In this paper we look at this question by considering an English education policy initiative Excellence in Cities which has been a flagship...

We study the importance of childhood socioeconomic conditions in explaining differences in life expectancy using data from a sample of around 5,000 children collected in the UK in 1937-39, who have been traced through official death records up to 2005. We estimate a number of duration of life...

Despite the increased frequency of job loss for older workers in Europe, little is known on its effect on the work-retirement decision. Employing individual data from the European Community Household Panel for Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.K., a multivariate competing-risks hazard model is...