Performance measurement in the public sector is largely based on objective metrics, which may be subject to gaming behaviour. This paper investigates a novel subjective performance evaluation system where independent inspectors visit schools at very short notice, publicly disclose their findings and sanction schools rated fail. First, I…

In recent years there has been an increase in the number of children going to school in England who do not speak English as a first language. We investigate whether this has an impact on the educational outcomes of native English speakers at the end of primary school. We show that the negative correlation observed in the raw data is mainly an…

Public college graduates in many developing countries outperform graduates of private ones on the college exit exams. This has often been attributed to the cutting edge education provided in public colleges. However, public colleges are highly subsidized, suggesting that the private-public education outcome gap might reflect the pre-determined…

The UK has progressively moved from a Higher Education (HE) system which is funded at the tax payers' expense to one which is funded by individual participants (and their parents) by scrapping student grants, introducing student loans and charging tuition fees. The purpose of this paper is to identify the impact of these changes on the demand for…

The report makes use of rich administrative data (the Work and Pensions Longitudinal Study) which records children's exact date of birth and home postcode (used to identify the admissions policy in each lone parent's local authority). It improves on previous studies by estimating the precise timing (relative to the date on which part-time nursery…

The Centre for the Economics of Education was asked to bring together a wide range of academic evidence (primarily England-based) to investigate the extent to which academic and non-academic childhood outcomes are complementary to each other, or are in some way traded-off against each other. The report also investigates the drivers of both…

The Every Child Matters (ECM) agenda was introduced in the UK, as a policy aiming to improve child outcomes along five broad areas. The categories are Be Healthy, Stay Safe, Enjoy and Achieve, Make a Positive Contribution and Achieve Economic Wellbeing. The objective therefore, is to move beyond the traditional focus on child academic outcomes, to…

Global economic transformations have never been as dramatic as in the twentieth century. Most countries have experienced radical changes in the standards of income per capita, technology, fertility, mortality, income inequality and the extent of democracy in the course of the past century. It is the goal of many disciplines--economics, history,…

This paper presents new empirical evidence on whether failing the high school exit exam increases the chance of exiting from high school "prior to high school completion". More importantly, the author discusses the potentially different impacts of failing the High School Exit Exams (HSEE) on students with limited English proficiency, racial…

Regional labour mobility has long been viewed as a crucial component in the functioning of the labour markets of different countries. Indeed, the study of regional labour mobility has moved towards the top of the research agenda, especially in Europe, where regional unemployment differentials have been persistently larger than in the United…

The Australian Education Union (AEU) commissioned the Monash University-ACER Centre for the Economics of Education and Training (CEET) to review funding and staffing for VET (vocational education and training), and especially for TAFE (technical and further education), in the context of the recently set COAG (Council of Australian Governments)…

The impact of date of birth on cognitive test scores is well documented across many countries, with the youngest children in each academic year performing more poorly, on average, than the older members of their cohort (see, for example, Bedard and Dhuey (2006) or Puhani and Weber (2005)1). However, relatively little is known about the driving…

It is difficult to know whether widening access to schools which provide a more academically oriented general education makes a difference to average educational achievement. We make use of reforms affecting admission to the "high ability" track in Northern Ireland, but not England. The comparison of educational outcomes between Northern Ireland…

In the year to February 2002, one in every five of the 9.8 million people who worked in Australia experienced at least one job separation. This paper looks at the determinants of job separation within a stayer/mover framework using individual-level data for Australia. Conditional on job separation the paper also investigates the determinants of…

Mental illness is associated with large costs to individuals and society. Education improves various health outcomes but little work has been done on mental illness. To obtain unbiased estimates of the effect of education on mental health, we rely on a rich longitudinal dataset that contains health information from childhood to adulthood and thus…