“What’s in a score?” (with Paul Bingley and Vibeke Jensen)
“Dynamic Discrimination” (with Alex Bryson)
“Integration of IDPs in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq” (with Sangar Youssif Salih, Ines Vilela)
"Social Projects and Neighbourhood Crime" (with Grigory Alexin and Melanie Luhrmann)
“Children in Care and their Peers” (with D. Anderberg, E. De Cao , G. Morendo, J. Orchek)
“Women's Labour Force Participation in England around WWI” (with J. Costas-Fernandez, M. Lührmann, M. Mohnen and A. Seltzer)
"When Parents Work from Home" with Pascal Achard and Michele Belot
This paper estimates the causal effect of parental right to work from home (WfH) on children’s educational attainment. Using administrative data from the Netherlands and variations in firm-specific WfH policies, which generate natural experiments, we find that children whose parents gain the right to WfH improve their scores on a high-stakes exam by 9% of a standard deviation. This results in a 4 percentage points upswing in qualifying for a general or academic track in secondary school. Additionally, using the labor force survey, we find that changes in WfH policies are associated with a 17 percentage points increase in WfH propensity, but no change in hours worked or income. These results highlight the large potential benefits of remote work in supporting families and their children
PEER REVIEWED ARTICLES
I am interested in various topics, I have tried to put some order and classified papers by themes, some papers might thus appear more than once. If you can't find an article you are looking for, drop me a line.
We study the impact of higher education financing on the academic aspirations of teenagers and their parents.
We exploit a reform which introduced a large increase in the tuition fees universities can charge, more generous
support for the poorest students and a more redistributive student loan system, and varied across the UK’s
constituent countries. Using rare survey data on post compulsory secondary and university education aspirations,
we find that teenagers’ aspirations are not responsive to large changes in higher education financing. In contrast,
parents adjust their aspirations, resulting in a reduction of the socio-economic aspiration gap for their children.
In knowledge-based economies, attracting and retaining international students can help expand the skilled workforce. Empirical evidence suggests that open migration policies and labor markets, whereby students can remain in the host country post-study, as well as good quality higher education institutions are crucial for successfully attracting international students. Student migration can positively affect economic growth in both sending and receiving countries, even though migrants themselves reap most of the gains, mainly through higher earnings.
We study the effect of ethno-linguistic classroom composition on performance, educational choices and post- graduation migration of students. In the setting of a British University where assignment to seminars is plausibly exogenous, we define two measures of classroom composition: the share of non-native speakers and the linguistic diversity of the non-speaker group. Non-native speaker’s performance benefits from greater linguistic diversity. Native speakers are unaffected by classroom composition. Survey information points to changed interaction pat- terns in the classroom as a likely mechanism. While ethno-linguistic seminar composition has no meaningful impact on subsequent course choice, the effect of initial diversity on grades persists until the final year of study. The results imply that avoiding segregation along language lines is key in providing education for an international student body.
This article explores the demand for soft, self-imposed commitment, and subsequent compliance behaviour, using a framed field study in a higher education setting. We find a substantial soft commitment demand and a remarkably high failure to comply with the chosen commitment. Students are more likely to demand soft commitment if they expect the task to be more time consuming and their relative performance to be lower. Failure to comply is associated with previous grade and personality traits. We find no evidence that soft commitment affects grades.
The paper examines how incentives to participate in on-line assessments (quizzes) affect students’ effort and performance.Our identification strategy exploits within-student weekly variation in incentives to attempt on-line quizzes.We find that tournament incentives and participation incentives are ineffective in increasing quiz participation. In contrast, making the quiz count towards the final grade substantially increases participation.We find no evidence of displacement of effort between weeks. Using a natural experiment which provides variation in assessment weighting of the quizzes between two cohorts, we find that affected students obtain better examination grades. We estimate the return to 10% assessment weighting to be around 0.27 of a standard deviation in the in-term examination grade.We find no evidence that assessment weighting has unintended consequences, i.e. that increased quiz effort displaces effort over the year, reduces other forms of effort or reduces (effort and thus) performance in other courses. Finally, assessment weighting induced effort increases most for students at and below median ability, resulting in a reduction of the grade gap by 17%.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany experienced an unprecedented temporary drop in fertility driven by economic uncertainty. We show that the children born during this transition period performed worse on a range of educational outcomes from an early age onward. The mothers of these children exhibit personal characteristics and family structures consistent with negative parental selection. Investigating the underlying mechanisms reveals that parental educational input and emotional attachment were also lower for these children. Finally, our ability to compare siblings means that we can reject that our results stem from a time of birth effect.
Employers regularly complain of a shortage of qualified scientists and advocate that to remain competitive more scientists need to be trained. However, using a survey of graduates from British universities, I report that 3 years after graduation less than 50% of graduates from science subjects are working in a scientific occupation.
Do applicants to higher education rely on expert judgement about the quality of the course when applying? Using application data across UK universities over a period of 8 years, we investigate how league tables affect prospective students’ application decisions. We use subject-specific ranking rather than the commonly used institution-level ranking. We find that a one standard deviation change in the subject-level ranking score of an institution is associated with, on average, a 4.3 per cent increase in application numbers per faculty. This effect is particularly pronounced among faculties with the best scores, and overseas applicants. Limits to the number of choices per applicant have increased the preponderance of league tables.
Does Higher Education Quality Matter in the UK?” Research in Labor Economics (2014)
This paper estimates the financial returns to higher education quality in the UK. To account for the selectivity of students to institution, we rely on a selection on observable assumptions. We use several estimates including the Generalised Propensity Score (GPS) of Hirano and Imbens, which relies on a continuous measure of institutional quality. This highlights that the returns to quality are heterogeneous and mostly driven by high-quality institutions. Moving from an institution in the third quality quartile to a top quality institution is associated with a 7% increase in earnings
“Parental Education, Income and Child’s Education” (with C. Harmon, V. O’Sullivan and I. Walker), IZA Journal of Labor Economics (2013)
We investigate the relationship between early school-leaving and parental education and paternal income using UK Labour Force Survey data. OLS estimation reveals modest effects of income, stronger effects of maternal education relative to paternal, and stronger effects on sons than daughters. Using IV to simultaneously model the endogeneity of parental education and income, the maternal education effect disappears, while paternal education remains significant but only for daughters. In our favourite specification, which proxy for permanent income, paternal income becomes insignificant. Thus policies alleviating income constraints to alter schooling decisions may not be as effective as policies which increase permanent income.
“Subject choice and earnings of UK graduates”, Economics of Education Review (2011)
Using a survey of a cohort of UK graduates, linked to administrative data on higher education participation, this paper investigates the labour market attainment of recent graduates by subject of study. We document a large heterogeneity in the mean wages of graduates from different subjects and a considerably larger one within subject with individuals with the most favourable unobserved characteristics obtaining wages almost twice as large as those with the worst. Moreover, gender differences in wages within subjects are also large. We then simulate a graduate tax to calculate a willingness to pay – in form of tuition fees – to capture these subject wage premia.
Students’ academic self-perception” (with S. Gibbons, A. Thorpe, M. Snell and S. Hoskins), Economics of Education Review (2009)
Participation rates in higher education differ persistently between some groups in society. Using two British datasets we investigate whether this gap is rooted in students’ misperception of their own and other’s ability, thereby increasing the expected costs to studying. Amongst high school pupils, we find that pupils with a more positive view of their academic abilities are more likely to expect to continue to higher education even after controlling for observable measures of ability and students’ characteristics. University students are also poor at estimating their own test performance and over-estimate their predicted test score. However, females, White and working class students have less inflated view of themselves. Self-perception has limited impact on the expected probability of success and expected returns amongst these university students.
We provide first evidence that variations in the expected returns to crime affect the location of property crime. Our identification strategy relies on the widely held perception in the United Kingdom that South Asian households store gold jewelry at home. Price movements on the international market for gold exogenously affect the expected gains from burgling these households. Using a neighborhood-level panel on crime and difference-in-differences, we find that burglaries in South Asian neighborhoods are more sensitive to variations in the gold price than other neighborhoods in the same municipality. We conduct various tests on neighborhood and individual data to eliminate alternative explanations.
Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the birth rate halved in East Germany. Using detailed state-cohort-level arrest-data, and a difference in differences strategy, we show that individuals born during this period of socio- economic turmoil were markedly more likely to be arrested than those conceived a few years earlier. This is the case for most crime types and both for boys and girls. Since these children grew-up in the same re-unified German environment, the differences in criminal activity are consistent with negative parental selection. We use individual-level data to highlight risk attitude as a potential mechanism linking maternal fertility decisions and children’s criminal activities. We show that mothers who gave birth between 1991 and 1993 in East Germany have a significantly greater preference for risk, and so do their children. Finally, we provide novel evidence of the strong correlation between high levels of risk preference and criminal participation.
FAMILY
Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the birth rate halved in East Germany. Using detailed state-cohort-level arrest-data, and a difference in differences strategy, we show that individuals born during this period of socio- economic turmoil were markedly more likely to be arrested than those conceived a few years earlier. This is the case for most crime types and both for boys and girls. Since these children grew-up in the same re-unified German environment, the differences in criminal activity are consistent with negative parental selection. We use individual-level data to highlight risk attitude as a potential mechanism linking maternal fertility decisions and children’s criminal activities. We show that mothers who gave birth between 1991 and 1993 in East Germany have a significantly greater preference for risk, and so do their children. Finally, we provide novel evidence of the strong correlation between high levels of risk preference and criminal participation.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany experienced an unprecedented temporary drop in fertility driven by economic uncertainty. We show that the children born during this transition period performed worse on a range of educational outcomes from an early age onward. The mothers of these children exhibit personal characteristics and family structures consistent with negative parental selection. Investigating the underlying mechanisms reveals that parental educational input and emotional attachment were also lower for these children. Finally, our ability to compare siblings means that we can reject that our results stem from a time of birth effect.
“Parental Education, Income and Child’s Education” (with C. Harmon, V. O’Sullivan and I. Walker), IZA Journal of Labor Economics (2013)
We investigate the relationship between early school-leaving and parental education and paternal income using UK Labour Force Survey data. OLS estimation reveals modest effects of income, stronger effects of maternal education relative to paternal, and stronger effects on sons than daughters. Using IV to simultaneously model the endogeneity of parental education and income, the maternal education effect disappears, while paternal education remains significant but only for daughters. In our favourite specification, which proxy for permanent income, paternal income becomes insignificant. Thus policies alleviating income constraints to alter schooling decisions may not be as effective as policies which increase permanent income.
MIGRATION
We study the effect of forced migration on public policy setting in the migrant-receiving country. After World War II, eight million expelled Germans arrived in West Germany within 5 years. We use regional variation in the population share of forced migrants across West German cities to estimate the effect of this inflow on cities’ taxation and spending decisions. To identify a causal effect, we pursue an instrumental variable strategy that leverages push factors of the expulsions while being orthogonal to local conditions in the destination regions. Our results show that cities with high inflows of forced migrants increased spending on welfare and education, decreased spending on infrastructure, raised local taxes, and incurred more debt. Part of these effects can be attributed to shifts in political preferences. The migrants held voting rights upon arrival and supported parties that explicitly catered to their interests and needs.
We study the effect of ethno-linguistic classroom composition on performance, educational choices and post- graduation migration of students. In the setting of a British University where assignment to seminars is plausibly exogenous, we define two measures of classroom composition: the share of non-native speakers and the linguistic diversity of the non-speaker group. Non-native speaker’s performance benefits from greater linguistic diversity. Native speakers are unaffected by classroom composition. Survey information points to changed interaction pat- terns in the classroom as a likely mechanism. While ethno-linguistic seminar composition has no meaningful impact on subsequent course choice, the effect of initial diversity on grades persists until the final year of study. The results imply that avoiding segregation along language lines is key in providing education for an international student body.
DISCRIMINATION
Research on employers' hiring discrimination is limited by the unlawfulness of such activity. Consequently, researchers have focused on the intention to hire. Instead, we rely on a virtual labour market, the Fantasy Football Premier League, where employers can freely exercise their taste for racial discrimination in terms of hiring and firing. The setting allows us to eliminate co-worker, consumer-based and statistical discrimination as potential sources of discrimination, thus isolating the effect of taste-based discrimination.We find no evidence of racial discrimination, either in initial hiring or through the season, in a context where employers are fully aware of current and prospective workers' productivity.
OTHER
“Health and Knowledge: The UK Measles, Mumps and Rubella Controversy” (with D. Anderberg and J. Wadsworth), Journal of Health Economics (2011)