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...

This research estimates models of the importance of conscientiousness for socio-economic outcomes. We use measures of conscientiousness at age 16 to explain adult wages and other outcomes, such as crime, health and savings behaviour. We use several waves from the 1970 British Cohort Study. Our...

On almost all measures of physical health, Scots fare worse than residents of any other region of the UK and often worse than the rest of Europe. Deaths from chronic liver disease and lung cancer are particularly prevalent in Scotland. The self-assessed wellbeing of Scots is lower than that of...

In recent years considerable interest has developed in going 'beyond GDP' to develop measures of economic progress which are more explicitly based on human wellbeing. This work has been inspired, in part, by Sen's non-utilitarian approach to welfare economics, but has been constrained by a lack...

This paper makes use of newly linked administrative data to better understand the determinants of higher education participation amongst individuals from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. It is unique in being able to follow two cohorts of students in England – those who took GCSEs...

This paper presents a new data set collected on representative samples across 6 countries: China, South Korea, Japan, Italy, the UK and the four largest states in the US. The information collected relates to work and living situations, income, behavior (such as social-distancing, hand-washing...

This paper studies the causal effect of English proficiency on residential location outcomes and the socioeconomic class of immigrants in England and Wales, exploiting a natural experiment. Based on the phenomenon that young children learn a new language more easily than older children, we...

Are individuals living in distinct urban or rural settings more likely to experience barriers to social inclusion? If so, what are the nature of the barriers that they face? Using a unique administrative dataset for Ireland's dominant social inclusion programme, this paper examines the effect of...

This study provides evidence that natural disasters negatively affect student outcomes, potentially explaining the lower academic achievement of students in rural areas compared to their urban counterparts in developing countries. Using data from the Colombian school census, I estimate a...

In this paper we estimate the effect of the Mexican conditional cash transfer program, Oportunidades, on consumption, and we explore some issues related to participation to the program and to the estimation of treatment effects. We discuss the comparability of treatment and control areas,...