Paying disadvantaged teenagers to stay in school (with Jack Britton, Nick Ridpath and Carmen Villa), IFS Working Paper 25/54. Submitted.

We evaluate the short- and long-run effects of a large conditional cash transfer program that paid students to remain in full-time education beyond the compulsory school-leaving age. The Education Maintenance Allowance paid teenagers from low-income families in the United Kingdom up to £30 per week ($70 in 2024 prices). Exploiting the programme’s staggered rollout across local areas in England, we find that participation in full-time education increased by two percentage points among the poorest students, and that the programme lowered crime amongst pupils with the lowest prior attainment. However, we find no improvements in test scores, no effect on qualifications beyond the lowest level, and a small negative effect on the labour market outcomes of eligible young people in their twenties. While the reductions in crime may have generated some social benefits, these are small relative to the programme’s substantial costs. 

Revisiting the solution of dynamic discrete choice models: time to bring back Keane and Wolpin (1994)? (with Jack Britton), IFS Working Paper 21/13

The 'curse of dimensionality' is a common problem in the estimation of dynamic models: as models get more complex, the computational cost of solving these models rises exponentially. Keane and Wolpin (1994) proposed a method for addressing this problem in finite-horizon dynamic discrete choice models by evaluating only a subset of state space points by Monte Carlo integration and interpolating the value of the remainder. This method was widely used in the late 1990s and 2000s but has rarely been used since, as it was found to be unreliable in some settings. In this paper, we develop an improved version of their method that relies on three amendments: systematic sampling, data-guided selection of state space points for Monte Carlo integration, and dispensing with polynomial interpolation when a multicollinearity problem is detected. With these improvements, the Keane and Wolpin (1994) method achieves excellent approximation performance even in a model with a large state space and substantial ex ante heterogeneity. 

Efficient likelihood simulation in discrete choice models with observed payoffs

Ethnic earnings gaps among university-educated men (with Jack Britton and Weijian Zou)

Student loans, field of study, and retraining (with Aureo de Paula)

Spillovers in social program participation: evidence from Chile (with Pedro Carneiro, Barbara Flores, Emanuela Galasso, Rita Ginja, and Aureo de Paula)

How voters would fight poverty: attitudes toward social assistance in the developing world (with Francois Gerard and Chris Hoy)