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...

Previous work by the authors suggested that during the 1970s and 1980s, a person's early cognitive ability became a less important determinant of his or her eventual educational achievement. Furthermore, over the same time period, family background started to have a greater impact on a person's...

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...

This paper develops and tests a new model of asymmetric information in the labour market involving employer learning. In the model, I provide theoretical conditions for the identification - based on the experience and tenure profiles of estimated returns to ability and education - of employer...