In a meritocratic society an individual's economic success is determined by their ability, not by their parents' socio-economic status. We assess whether meritocracy has increased in both the British education system and labour market. The richness of our longitudinal data enables us to look at...

This paper contributes to the understanding of how compulsory schooling regulations affect educational attainment and subsequent labour market outcomes. It uses valuable information from a natural experiment driven by rules that allow for variation in legal dropout dates. Since the school...