We consider the effects of daytime fasting by pregnant women during the lunar month of Ramadan on their children's test scores at age seven. Using English register data, we find that scores are 0.05 to 0.08 standard deviations lower for Pakistani and Bangladeshi students exposed to Ramadan in early pregnancy. These estimates are downward biased to…

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…

In this paper, we study a high profile case--the introduction of academy schools into the English secondary school sector--that has allowed schools to gain more autonomy and flexible governance by changing their school structure. We consider the impact of an academy school conversion on their pupil intake and pupil performance and possible…

There is great interest in understanding the potential of teacher incentives to improve student achievement. In fact, teacher incentives, either individual or collective, may improve student achievement if they succeed in aligning the public or social goals with the goals of the teacher. However, an approach in which reward is based on outputs can…

The British system of student loans has a zero real rate of interest, less than it costs the government to borrow the money. This paper discusses the problems that arise from interest subsidies in the UK system of student loans; systems in other countries, for example Australia and New Zealand, face similar problems. The topic appears to be narrow…

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,…

In this paper, the author looks at whether teachers give better subjective assessments to students of their own race and/or gender, conditionally on test scores. Subjective assessments are pervasive in schools; most teachers fill school records that include comments on the child's ability or behavior. And important decisions such as tracking,…

The expansion of compulsory schooling after the Second World War represented an important reform common to the majority of European countries. Specifically, over the period 1950-2000, the fifteen Western European countries considered in this study have extended the school-leaving age by one year or longer. Interestingly, this change in legislation…

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…

We consider the influence that mobile pupils have on the academic achievements of other pupils in English primary schools. We find that immobile pupils in year-groups (a la US "grades") that experience high pupil entry rates progress less well academically between ages 8 and 11 than pupils in low-mobility year groups (grades), even within the same…

The recent industrial action taken by the Association of University Teachers (AUT) has given the issue of academic pay high prominence in the UK press. There appears to be a remarkable consensus that higher education academic salaries are too low, relative to other groups of workers in the UK, and that this is leading to an academic "brain drain".…

We analyse in detail the factors that lead to intergenerational persistence among sons, where this is measured as the association between childhood family income and later adult earnings. We seek to account for the level of income persistence in the 1970 BCS cohort and also to explore the decline in mobility in the UK between the 1958 NCDS cohort…

We provide estimates of the effect of attending a Faith school on educational attainment progress during the Primary education phase in England. We argue that there are no credible instruments for Faith school attendance. Instead, we control for selection on religious schooling by tracking pupils over time and comparing attainments of students who…