The paper examines UK PhD completion and withdrawal rates, in a competing risks framework, using the 1986 National Survey of 1980 Graduates. The statistical problem of thresholding of completion data is also addressed. We argue that our results suggest that there are problems with the use of PhD...

<p><p><p>Consider an observed binary regressor D and an unobserved binary variable D*, both of which affect some other variable Y . This paper considers nonparametric identification and estimation of the effect of D on Y , conditioning on D* = 0. For example, suppose Y is a person's wage, the unobserved...</p></p></p>

Much like an inherited trait, poverty trends to pass from parent to child. How prevalent is this "curse of the poor," why do some escape it, and how can we help improve the odds? This study sets out to gauge the extent of this "Intergenerational transmiss

The introduction of performance-related pay with Performance Management in the state school sector of England and Wales represents a considerable change in the school management system. After 2000, all teachers were subject to annual goal setting performance reviews. Experienced teachers were...

This paper provides a comparison of 12 OECD countries on the basis of the (multidimensional) inequality in both disposable income and access to public goods. The public goods considered, measured at the regional level, are infant mortality and pupils/teacher ratios at public schools. The...

Why does schooling attainment vary widely across countries? Why are differences in schooling attainment highly persistent? I show that cross-country differences in schooling are related to political institutions, such as democracy and local democracy (political decentralization), which are...

A serious difficulty in determining the importance of credit constraints in education arises because standard data sources do not provide a direct way of identifying which students are credit constrained. This paper differentiates itself from previous work by taking a direct approach for...

Previous papers which examine the importance of peer effects using exogenous variation in college roommates have found only very limited evidence that a student’s first year grade performance is influenced by the observable academic characteristics of his/her roommate. One possible explanation...

Work-related training is considered to be very important for providing the workforce with the necessary skills for maintaining and enhancing the competitiveness of the firms and the economy. According to the classical human capital theory general training is entirely financed by workers. This...

This note aims to provide a theoretical framework to think of the youthunemployment problem and a classification of EU countries according to the way they address it.The key factor to explain youth unemployment is what we call the youth experience gap. To helpyoung people fill it in and ease...