This study explores the effects of exposure to regular paternal childcare (without the mother present) in the first three years of life on the academic and social capabilities of boys and girls when they begin school. Innovations in this paper are the use of data on children’s early attributes...

The effect of a more able peer group on a child’s attainment is considered an integral part in estimating a pupil level educational production function. Examinations in England at age 16 are tiered according to ability, leading to a large stratification of pupils by ability. However, within...

This paper draws on the economics literature on market labour supply and the sociology literature on domestic labour supply. Each literature has explored the factors underlying male specialisation in market work and female specialisation in domestic work, but has tended to focus on labour supply...

The paper focuses on the empirical evidence on the use and usefulness of performance measures in the public sector. It begins with consideration of the features of the public sector which make the use of performance measures complex: the issues of multiple principals and multiple tasks. It...

This paper investigates the impact of macroeconomic shocks on infant mortality in India and investigates likely mechanisms. A recent OECD-dominated literature shows that mortality at most ages is pro-cyclical but similar analyses for poorer countries are scarce, and both income risk and...

In multiple-task hidden-action models, the (mis-)allocation of effort may play an important role for benefit creation. Signals which capture this benefit and which are used in incentive schemes should thus not only be judged by the noise and the associated costs but also by the mis-allocation...

Public services can be, and are, delivered according to a variety of different arrangements. The public sector can finance and provide a service itself, or contract with the private sector to participate in provision, or its role may be limited to regulating a private provider. In this paper we...

We build a unified theoretical framework to analyze the main incentive issues in Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) and the shape of optimal contracts in those contexts. We present a basic model of procurement in a multitask environment in which a risk-averse agent chooses unobservable efforts...

This paper evaluates the impact of a team-based incentive scheme piloted in the public sector agency, Jobcentre Plus. The way the scheme has been designed raises many questions for which theory makes predictions. We test these predictions against our data. We find that team size affects the...

We study the impact of school choice on test score outcome. It has generally proved difficult to isolate exogenous differences in the degree of competition faced by schools. We run a difference-in-difference analysis, exploiting a local government reorganisation to provide identification. This...