For the past few years, CEP research associate Peter Boone and his colleagues at Effective Intervention have been running primary school education projects in the rural villages of Andhra Pradesh and Guinea-Bissau. Their initial survey of literacy and numeracy in Guinea-Bissau showed that very...

Please see the CEP #ElectionEconomics report(Paper 1)and the Executive Summary (Paper 2) that cover all the election 2015 briefings, discussing the research evidence on 15 of the UK's key policy battlegrounds: immigration, austerity, real wages and living standards, productivity and business,...

This paper investigates whether there exists an employment penalty from motherhood in Spain. In particular, we are interested in transitions from employment to non-employment and downward occupational mobility. Results show that Spanish women experience significant transitions from employment to...

This paper makes use of the substantial information about the psychological and behavioural development of children by age ten in the 1970 Cohort to predict later, economic outcomes, namely qualifications, employment and earnings. It is found that this previously unobserved individual...

We investigate the impact of computer usage at work and other job features on the changing skills required of workers. We compare skills utilisation in Britain at three data points: 1986, 1992 and 1997, using responses to identical questions on comparable surveys. We question the validity of...

One theory for why there is an education gradient in health outcomes is that more educated individuals more quickly absorb new health-related information. The measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) controversy provides a case where, for a short period, some publicized research suggested that the...

While there has been intense debate in the empirical literature about the effects of minimum wages on inequality in the US, its general equilibrium effects have been given little attention. In order to quantify the full effects of a decreasing minimum wage on inequality, I build a dynamic...

This paper offers a rational approach to the economics and psychology of fear and provides empirical evidence that supports our theory. We explicitly consider both the impact of danger on emotions and the distortive effect of fear on subjective beliefs and individual choices. Yet, we also...

If you pay peanuts, do you get monkeys? If teachers were better paid and higher up the national income distribution, would there be an improvement in pupil performance? Peter Dolton and Oscar Marcenaro-Gutierrez examine the enormous variation in teachers' pay across OECD countries and its...

England's most widely used indicator of young people's education and labour market status is the NEET category - 'not in education, employment or training'. Making comparisons with how France and Germany measure school leavers' progression and achievement, Hilary Steedman argues that NEET is no...