Charitable bequests are a major source of income for charities but surprisingly little is known about them. The aim of this paper is to propose a multi-stage framework for analysing the bequest decision and to examine the evidence for Great Britain provided by new data on estates. The novelty of...

Charitable giving for overseas development and emergency relief is important in the UK, being about a quarter of the size of government development aid. There has been a strong growth over time, reflecting the activities of development charities and the public response to a series of...

Income is an important correlate for numerous phenomena in the social sciences. But manysurveys collect data with just a single question covering all forms of income. This raisesissues of quality, and these are heightened when individuals are asked about the householdtotal rather than own income...

'League table' information on school effectiveness in England generally relies on either a comparison of the average outcomes of pupils by school, e.g. mean exam scores, or on estimates of the average value added by each school. These approaches assume that the information parents and...

A new book on measuring global poverty by the late Tony Atkinson was published in 2019 by Princeton University Press. We describe how we edited the incomplete manuscript that Atkinson left at his death, the additions we made (which include afterwords by François Bourguignon and Nick Stern), and...

Within-country differences in educational outcomes are compared for a large group of industrialised countries. We investigate where inequality is greatest, the association between inequality in learning and average levels of learning, the interpretation of measured levels of inequality, and...

Tony Atkinson is universally celebrated for his outstanding contributions to the measurement and analysis of inequality, but he never saw the study of inequality as a separate branch of economics. He was an economist in the classical sense, rejecting any sub-field labelling of his interests and...

Using logistic and multilevel logistic modelling we examine non-response at the school and pupil level to the important educational achievement survey Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for England. The analysis exploits unusually rich auxiliary information on all schools and...

The international surveys of pupil achievement – PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS – have been widely used to compare socioeconomic gradients in children's cognitive abilities across countries. Socioeconomic status is typically measured drawing on children's reports of family or home characteristics...

Greater levels of social mobility are widely seen as desirable on grounds of both equity and efficiency. Debate on social mobility in Britain and elsewhere has recently focused on specific factors that might hinder social mobility, including the role of internships and similar employment...