This paper addresses a lack of evidence on the impact of performance pay in the public sector by evaluating a pilot scheme of incentives in a major government agency. The incentive scheme was based on teams and covered quantity and quality targets, measured with varying degrees of precision. We...

The adoption of performance related pay schemes has become increasingly popular in the public sector of several countries. In the UK, the scheme designers favoured collective performance pay with the aim to foster cooperation across offices. The resulting team structure included several offices...

Substantial immigrant segregation in the United States, combined with the increase in the share of the U.S. foreign-born population, have led to great interest in the causes and consequences of immigrant concentration, including those related to the functioning of labor markets. This paper...

This review describes the research frontier on human capital and education in economics research. It delineates what is known and largely agreed, and what are the most promising lines for future research. The approach will be to explain clearly and precisely the research evidence, in a way that...

We investigate the impact on earnings inequality of a selective education system in which school assignment is based on initial test scores. We use a large, representative household panel survey to compare adult earnings inequality of those growing up under a selective education system with...

We study attitudes to education among English adolescents. Using PISA data, we show there is considerable variation in these attitudes depending on background: immigrant students have substantially and significantly more positive attitudes to school than native children, a difference that...

Refugees are often perceived as an economic "burden", as the current debate on the European refugee crisis illustrates. But there is little quantitative evidence on the medium-term outcomes of refugees in the UK. We fill this gap by looking at the case of "East African Asians" who arrived as...

We analyze the impact of incentivizing students' effort during the school year on performance on high-stakes assessments in a field experiment with 63 low-income high schools and over 10,000 students. We contribute to the literature on education incentives by incentivising inputs rather than...

A common feature of public sector labor markets is the use of pay scales. This paper examines how the removal of pay scales impacts productivity, by exploiting a reform that compelled all schools in England to replace pay scales with school-designed performance related pay schemes. We find that...

We examine the effect of survey measurement error on the empirical relationship between child mental health and personal and family characteristics, and between child mental health and educational progress. Our contribution is to use unique UK survey data that contains (potentially biased)...