The world has still to emerge fully from the housing-triggered Global Financial Crisis, but housing crises are not new. The history of housing shows long-run social progress, littered with major disasters; nevertheless the progress is often forgotten, whilst the difficulties hit the headlines....

This paper estimates the return to education using two alternative instrumental variable estimators: one exploits variation in schooling associated with early smoking behaviour, the other uses the raising of the minimum school leaving age. Each instrument estimates a 'local average treatment...

We discuss fixed and random effects models in the context of educational research and set out the assumptions behind the two approaches. To illustrate the issues, we analyse the determinants of pupil achievement in primary school, using data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and...

We study the origins of what has become one of the most radical and encompassing programmes of school reform seen in the recent past amongst advanced countries – the introduction of academy schools to English secondary education. Academies are state schools that are allowed to run in an...

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) was a leading figure in the British classical school of economics, best-known for extending the insights of Adam Smith at a time of revolutionary improvements in agriculture and industry. This book explores the way in which he accounted for the tendency to...

The Ottoman Empire had a profound impact in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa at the apogee of its power, covering the era between 1453 C. E. and 1699 C. E. In this paper, I exploit the empire's unique culture and institutions to examine the roles of ethnicity and religion in conflict and...

The following paper attempts to trace the construction of the standard employment contract in Germany from the beginning of the 19th century onwards. It was from this point in time that wage labour slowly came into being and later on developed more broadly. At first, state regulations were...