Many developed countries have recently experienced sharp increases in home birth rates. This paper investigates the impact of home births on the health of low-risk newborns using data from the Netherlands, the only developed country where home births are widespread. To account for endogeneity in...

This paper uses the housing market to examine the costs of indoor air pollution. We focus on radon, an indoor air pollutant which is the largest source of exposure to natural ionising radiation and the leading cause of lung cancer after smoking. To overcome potential confounders, we exploit a...

We use the exogenous assignment of Army personnel to duty locations to analyze the relationship between the characteristics of local markets and the propensity for consumers to be subjected to racial discrimination in their everyday commercial transactions. Overall, one in ten soldiers report...

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...

We study the extent of overcrowding amongst British urban working families in the early 1900s and find major regional differences. In particular, a much greater proportion of households in urban Scotland were overcrowded than in the rest of Britain and Ireland. We investigate the causes of this...

We investigate the extent to which deficiency at English as measured by English as Additional Language (EAL), contribute to the immigrant-native wage gap for female employees in the UK, controlling for covariates. To deal with the endogeneity of EAL and a substantial problem of self-selection...

The literature on neighbourhood effects suggests that the lack of social mobility of some groups has a spatial dimension. It is thought that those living in the most deprived neighbourhoods are the least likely to achieve upward mobility because of a range of negative neighbourhood effects. Most...

Working as a volunteer is a widespread phenomenon that has both individual and societal benefits. In this paper, we identify the wage returns to working for free by exploiting exogenous variation in rainfall across local area districts in England, Scotland and Wales. Instrumental variables...

Based on a unique composite dataset measuring heterogeneous sports participation, labour market outcomes and local facilities provision, this paper examines for the first time the association between different types of sports participation on employment and earnings in England. Clear...

This paper examines UK migration policy and recent migration flows from Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries to the UK. Although inflows of migrant workers were relatively large in the mid-2000s, especially amongst Ukrainians, these have fallen following changes to UK immigration policy,...