One of the many changes in India since economic liberalisation began in 1991 is the increased use of private schooling. There has been a growing body of literature to assess whether this is a positive trend and to evaluate the effects on child achievement levels. The challenge is to identify the...

The measurement of school performance for secondary schools in England has developed from simple measures of marginal performance at age 16 to more complex contextual value-added measures that account for pupil prior attainment and background. These models have been developed within the...

This paper reports a study on the socio-economic determinants of completed fertility in Mexico. An innovative Poisson Double-Hurdle count model is developed for the analysis. This methodological approach allows low and high order parities to be determined by two different data generating...

For the first time in 2008 the Annual School Census (ASC) required all schools to provide pupil information on the language spoken at home. Our analysis focuses on children attending state schools in London. Over 300 languages are spoken by London pupils, around 60% of London pupils are English...

Investigation of peer effects on achievement with sample survey data on schools may mean that only a random sample of peers is observed for each individual. This generates classical measurement error in peer variables, resulting in the estimated peer group effects in a regression model being...

Accurate estimates of the extent of ethnic parity amongst benefit claimants are very important for policymakers who provide interventions for these groups. We use new administrative data on benefit claimants in Great Britain to document differences in labour market outcomes between Ethnic...

This paper measures the extent to which the presence of religious state-funded secondary schools in England impacts on the educational experiences of pupils who attend neighbouring schools, whether through school effort induced by competition or changes in peer groups induced by sorting....

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Programme administration is a relatively neglected issue in the analysis of disincentive effects of unemployment benefit systems. We investigate this issue with a field experiment in Hungary involving random assignment of benefit claimants to treatment and control groups. Treatment increases the...

Government and researchers use school performance measures such as contextual value-added to claim that giving schools autonomy from local authority control produces superior pupil performance in GCSE examinations. This paper explores the extent to which inferring causality between autonomy and...