Place-based policies commonly target underperforming areas, such as deteriorating downtown business districts and disadvantaged regions. Principal examples include enterprise zones, European Union Structural Funds, and industrial cluster policies. Place-based policies are rationalized by various...

Roughly 20% of adults in the OECD lack basic numeracy and literacy skills. In the UK, many colleges offer fully government subsidized adult education programs to improve these skills. Constructing a unique dataset consisting of weekly attendance records for 1179 students, we find that...

This paper contributes to understanding the ‘London Effect’, focussing on the role of the ethnic composition. The aim is to understand the statistical contribution to the London premium of ethnic composition. I also analyse data on the performance of recent immigrants. The results confirm...

“Nudges" - small, usually cheap, interventions to alter the behaviour of individuals to improve their “health, wealth or happiness", are increasingly popular with governments and have thus far played a large role in the coalition government's attempts to encourage pro-social behaviour. The...

When and how should a fundraiser ask for a donation from an individual facing an uncertain bonus income? A standard model of expected utility over outcomes predicts that the individual’s before choice – her ex-ante commitment conditional on her income – will be the same as her choice after...

Finding a job, especially in a recovering economy, is challenging and success is reliant upon effective job-search activity. Jobseekers Allowance (JSA) welfare benefit claimants in the United Kingdom have many competing options available to them in terms of how they direct their efforts in...

Previous work on anonymous donations has looked almost exclusively at exogenous anonymity. This study considers endogenous anonymity, approaching it from two angles. We present stylised facts of anonymous giving, drawn from a large dataset of donations on behalf of runners in the London...

Besley and Ghatak (2001) show that public good should be owned by the agent who values the public good most — irrespective of technological factors. In this paper we relax their assumptions in a natural way by allowing the agents to be indispensable and show that relative valuations are not...

Height has long been recognised as associated with better outcomes: the question is whether this association is causal. We use children’s genetic variants as instrumental variables (IV) to deal with possible unobserved confounders and examine the effect of child and adolescent height on a wide...

We analyse the initial impact of a major school admission reform in Brighton and Hove. The new system incorporated a lottery for oversubscribed places and new catchment areas. We examine the post-reform changes in school composition. We locate the major winners and losers in terms of the quality...