The Government and its agencies have seriously overestimated the impact of the specialist schools programme on educational attainment. The substantially higher exam scores achieved on average by schools with specialist status are due primarily to sample selection bias and not to any benefits...

Previous research has shown how more attractive people reap more rewards in a variety of settings. We show that attractiveness as measured by facial symmetry leads to greater rewards in professional sports. National Football League quarterbacks who are more attractive are paid greater salaries...

Summary

This paper provides estimates of the impact of higher education qualifications on the earnings of graduates in the UK by subject studied. We use data from the recent UK Labour Force Surveys which provide a sufficiently large sample to consider the effects of the subject studied, class of first...

Several recent studies advocate the use of nonparametric estimators of daily price vari- ability that exploit intraday information. This paper compares four such estimators, realised volatility, realised range, realised power variation and realised bipower variation, by examining their in-sample...

We test the theoretical prediction that profit sharing reduces worker separations and by doing so increases the incidence of training. Using individual level UK data, we confirm that profit sharing is a robust determinant of lower separation rates and of greater training incidence. Critically,...

Economic growth models under uncertainty and rational agents with CRRA utility have been shown to provide quite fragile explanations of consumers.choice as equlib- rium comsumption paths (expected utility) are drastically dependant on distributional assumptions. We show that assuming a SNP...

This paper extends the results of Byers, Davidson and Peel (1997) on long memory in support for the Conservative and Labour Parties in the UK using longer samples and additional poll series. It finds continuing support for the ARFIMA(0,d,0) model though with somewhat smaller values of the long...

Slow adjustment of real exchange rate towards its long run equilibrium in linear models has long puzzled researchers and provided the impetus for the adoption of particular classes of nonlinear models. The exponential smooth transition model has been particularly successful as an ex post...