Using data from OECD's PISA, Eurostat and World Bank's WDI, we explore how child cognitive outcomes at the aggregate country level are related to macroeconomic conditions, specifically government education expenditures and early education experience. We find that both government expenditures in...

This paper tests whether and how two education policies: (i) increasing the length of compulsory education and (ii) introducing foreign languages into compulsory school curricula, affect subsequent migration across European countries. We construct a novel data base that includes information on...

This paper investigates whether individuals living in neighbourhoods with high concentrations of unemployment are less likely to enter work if they are unemployed and more likely to lose their job if they are employed. The main challenge in the neighbourhood effects literature is the...

Although we know a lot about why households choose certain dwellings, we know relatively little about the mechanisms behind neighbourhood choice. Most studies of neighbourhood choice only focus on one or two dimensions of neighbourhoods: typically poverty and ethnicity. This paper argues that...

The number of studies investigating neighbourhood effects has increased rapidly over the last two decades. Although many of these studies claim to have found evidence for neighbourhood effects, most 'evidence' is likely the result of reversed causality. The main challenge in modelling...

This paper provides new evidence on the effect of school construction projects on home prices, academic achievement, and public school enrollment. Taking advantage of the staggered implementation of a comprehensive school construction project in a poor urban district, we find that, by six years...

Studies of neighbourhood effects typically investigate the instantaneous effect of point-in-time measures of neighbourhood poverty on individual outcomes. It has been suggested that it is not solely the current neighbourhood, but also the neighbourhood history of an individual that is important...