In this article we consider how international migration is related to the frequency and duration of trips to the home country. For many migrants, international migration triggers a series of trips to visit the home country that allow for a replenishment of the depleted relationship capital with...

One of the goals of the Right to Buy (RTB) was to stimulate labour migration by removing the debilitating effect of social housing on geographical mobility. This is the first study to examine rigorously whether the Right to Buy legislation did indeed 'free-up' those in social housing who bought...

We hypothesize that as the distance of a residential move increases, the cost of collecting information on the destination housing market rises, the amount and quality of information collected fall, and the chances of making an ill-informed housing purchase decision increases, reducing the...

In this article, we test whether tenure choice influences employment. This influence might arise through a number of channels, including transaction costs, lock-in effects, wealth effects, externalities and commuting times. These factors could collectively have either a positive or negative...

Expanding parental choice in education may increase system-wide productivity if parents select schools that form a specifically good match with their children. I investigate the effect of attending a preferred school on student achievement in London primary schools. I exploit as good as random...

Social capital is widely regarded to constitute an important indicator for the economic performance of a society. This paper analyzes the impact of various socio-demographic characteristics on social capital. Proxy variables for social capital are obtained from a comprehensive principal...

We model a higher education system that admits students according to their admission signal (e.g., matriculation GPA, SAT), which is, in turn, affected by their cognitive ability and socioeconomic background. We show that subsidizing education loans increases neither human capital stock nor...

On 23 June 2016, the British electorate voted to leave the European Union. We analyze vote and turnout shares across 380 local authority areas in the United Kingdom. We find that exposure to the EU in terms of immigration and trade provides relatively little explanatory power for the referendum...

A large number of studies have analysed the role of individual and geographical determinants of voting behaviour in the context of the recent EU referendum in the UK, but several questions remain. One key unresolved issue is the extent of interaction between individual voter characteristics and...

This paper studies the causal effect of English proficiency on residential location outcomes and the socioeconomic class of immigrants in England and Wales, exploiting a natural experiment. Based on the phenomenon that young children learn a new language more easily than older children, we...