This paper examines the impact of month of birth on national achievement test scores in England whilst children are in school, and on subsequent further and higher education participation. Using geographical variation in school admissions policies, we are able to split this difference into an...

This paper is an evaluation of the British labor market program the New Deal for the Young Unemployed using administrative panel data on individuals between 1982 and 1999. This mandatory program involves extensive job assistance followed by various other options, including wage subsidies. We...

Friedman's book on the Óƒonsumption FunctionÔ is one of the great works of Economics demonstrating how the interplay between theoretical ideas and data analysis could lead to major policy implications. We present a short review of Friedman's Permanent Income Hypothesis, the origins of the...

We examine the contribution of human capital to economy-wide technological improvements through the two channels of innovation and imitation. We develop a theoretical model showing that skilled labor has a higher growth-enhancing effect closer to the technological frontier under the reasonable...

This research is part of a large evaluation effort, undertaken by a consortium formed by IFS, Econometria and SEI, which has considered the effects of Familias en Acción on a variety of outcomes one year after its implementation. In early reports, we focussed on the effects of the programme on...

We specify a structural life-cycle model of consumption, labour supply and job mobility in an economy with search frictions that allows us to distinguish between different sources of risk and to estimate their effects. The sources of risk are shocks to productivity, job destruction, the process...

We develop a dynamic discrete choice model of training choice, employment and wage growth, allowing for job mobility, in a world where wages depend on firm-worker matches, as well as experience and tenure and jobs take time to locate. We estimate this model on a large administrative panel data...

Following the great expansion of secondary education in the United States between 1910 and 1940, Sweden was one of the first Western European countries to attempt such an expansion by increasing the years of compulsory schooling and and improving access to academic type education by abolishing...

This paper evaluates whether means-tested grants paid to secondary students are an effective way of reducing the proportion of school dropouts. We look at this problem using matching techniques on a pilot study carried out in England during 1999 and 2000 using a specially designed dataset that...

Recent theoretical work has shown the importance of measuring microeconomic uncertainty for models of both general and partial equilibrium under imperfect insurance. In this paper the assumption of i.i.d. income innovations used in previous empirical studies is removed and the focus of the...