As in many other countries, government policy in the UK has the objective of raising the participation rate of young people in higher education, while also increasing the share of the costs of higher education borne by students themselves. A rationale for the latter element comes from evidence...

A number of papers have looked at the bias in the fractional integration parameter, d using a variety of alternative estimation techniques. This paper supplements that literature by investigating the bias in both the short-term and long-term parameters for a range of ARFIMA models using a more...

Five alternative forecasting methods used for SETAR modeling are compared with each other, and relative to mis-specified linear AR models, using Monte Carlo simulation. The results show that for forecasting beyond 1-step ahead, the method that uses Monte Carlo to generate forecasts out-perform...

We investigate the effects of outliers on the KPSS tests. We find that for nonstationary series outliers induce spurious stationarity by lowering the power of these tests. The empirical size of these tests is also found to be sensitive to the location of the outlier.

Changes in educational participation rates across cohorts are likely to imply changes in the ability-education relationship and thereby to impact on estimated returns to education. We show that skewness in the underlying ability distribution is a key determinant of the impact of graduate...

An increase over time in the proportion of young people obtaining a degree is likely to impact on the relative ability compositions (i) of graduates and non-graduates and (ii) across graduates with different classes of degree award. In a signalling framework, we examine the implications of this...

From a unique data-set identifying the school attended prior to university for a full cohort of UK university students, we examine the determinants of final degree classification. We exploit the detailed school-level information and focus on the influence of school characteristics, such as...

Objectives To assess the extent to which various factors influence the probability that an individual medical student will drop out of medical school during their first year of study, focusing on the influence both of prior qualifications, such as A-level subjects taken and scores attained, and...

This paper investigates the size and power of a number of unit root tests, currently in use in both applied macro and financial economics, when the data generating process is fractionally integrated. The long persistence characteristic of fractionally integrated processes lowers the power of...

Official employment-related Performance Indicators in UK Higher Education are based on the population of students responding to the First Destination Supplement (FDS). This generates potentially biased performance indicators as this population of students is not necessarily representative of the...