Existing research shows that house prices respond to local school quality as measured by average test scores. However, higher test scores could signal better quality teaching and academic value-added, or higher ability, sought-after intakes. In our research, we show decisively that value-added drives households' demand for good schooling. However,…

Stereotypes, role models played by teachers and social norms influence girls' academic self-concept and push girls to choose humanities rather than science. Do recruiters reinforce this strong selection by discriminating more against girls in more scientific subjects? Using the entrance exam of a French higher education institution (the Ecole…

The need for education to help every child rather than focus on average attainment has become a more central part of the policy agenda in the US and the UK. Remedial programmes are often difficult to evaluate because participation is usually based on pupil characteristics that are largely unobservable to the analyst. In this paper we evaluate…

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…

Educational inequalities are evident even before children start school. Some educational achievement gaps widen out as individuals progress further through the education sequence and into the labour market, especially those connected to disadvantaged students. Thus, there is a significant need for careful evaluation of educational policies that…

Improvement of educational attainment in schools in urban, disadvantaged areas is an important priority for policy--particularly in countries like England which have a long tail at the bottom of the educational distribution and where there is much concern about low social mobility. An anomaly in the spatial dimension of school funding policy in…

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…

Education is recognized to be a key factor of economic development, not only giving access to technological progress as emphasized by the Schumpeterian growth theory, but also entailing numerous social externalities such as the demographic transition (Murtin, 2009) or democratization (Murtin and Wacziarg, 2010). If the evolution of world…

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…

There has been much policy interest on the theme of children's services in recent years. For example, the 1998 National Child Strategy explicitly aims to ensure good quality, affordable childcare for children aged 0 to 14 in every neighbourhood, including both formal childcare and support for informal arrangements. The sector has a changed a lot…

Among policymakers, educators and economists there remains a strong, sometimes heated, debate on the extent to which good schools matter. This is seen, for instance, in the strong trend towards establishing accountability systems in education in many countries across the world. In this paper, in line with some recent studies, we value school…

Using the 1991 to 2007 waves of the UK British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), the authors estimate a fixed effects specification that has as outcomes (i) earnings and (ii) an indicator of social position measured using the CAMSIS scale. Adopting a fixed effects specification enables them to isolate the role of lifelong learning on these two…

Private schools have historically played an important role in the reproduction of the ruling classes in Britain. They continue to do so, but there is surprisingly little modern research as to how these schools impinge on the economy. In this paper we analyse the role of independent schools in the teachers' labour market. Teacher shortages in…

Intergenerational mobility is concerned with the relationship between the socio-economic status of parents and the socio-economic outcomes of their children as adults. This can be measured in a variety of ways, by income and earnings, social class or status, or education. If an individual's income/social class/education is strongly related to his…

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,…