The medium-term impact of a conditional cash transfer programme on educational outcomes in England

Education Economics (2024)

This paper uses longitudinal data from England to examine the medium-term impact of a means-tested conditional cash transfer programme, Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA), on higher educational participation and attainment. Combining regression modelling with entropy balancing, this paper finds that two-year EMA recipients are more likely to participate in higher education than non-recipients. Moreover, the impact of EMA is more substantial for male students, those with higher prior academic attainment, and students whose parents have higher educational qualifications. These findings suggest that even though EMA is a costly programme, it will benefit young people over a longer time frame.

Accounting for intergenerational income persistence in a new cohort: noncognitive skills, ability and education  (with Paul Gregg, Lindsey Macmillan, Nikki Shure, and Gill Wyness)

Despite the fact that a well-established literature has examined intergenerational income mobility for those born before the 1980s in the UK, relatively little work has been done using more recent birth cohorts. This paper contributes to the existing literature by using recent income data for a relatively young generation, those born in 1989-90. We establish the level of intergenerational persistence among sons, which is measured as the association between family income in childhood and later adult earnings, as well as examine its contributing factors. Building on previous work, we then contextualise this persistence by comparing the younger cohort to the 1970 birth cohort. We focus on cognitive skills, non‐cognitive traits, and educational attainment as mediating factors. Our best estimate of intergenerational income persistence among sons born in 1989-90 is 0.224, which is comparable to that for the 1970 cohort. Our results also suggest that education plays an important role in explaining the persistence for both cohorts. 

Intergenerational educational mobility and the COVID-19 pandemic (with Anna Adamecz, Nikki Shure, and Gill Wyness)

We examine the differential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the labour market outcomes of graduate workers by their family background. Specifically, we compare first in family (FiF) graduates, young people who obtained a university degree even though their parents did not, with their graduate peers whose parents have university degrees. We compare their labour market outcomes using multiple waves of data collected during the pandemic, which are linked to an existing longitudinal study and administrative data. We find that FiF graduates, both men and women, were just as likely to keep working during the pandemic as the graduate children of graduate parents. Our results, however, reveal substantial differences in the outcomes of graduates who stopped working, and these differences are heterogeneous by gender. Female FiF graduates were more likely to stop working altogether or to be put on unpaid leave and less likely to be put on furlough or paid leave than non-FiF female graduates. However, we find no such differences between FiF and non-FiF male graduates. Our results highlight how the COVID-19 recession has exacerbated the disadvantage arising from the intersectionality of socioeconomic background and gender and the prolonged impact of parental human capital for women.

Intergenerational Mobility of Immigrants in 15 Destination Countries (with Leah Boustan, Mathias Fjællegaard Jensen, Ran Abramitzky, et al. )

We estimate intergenerational mobility of immigrants and their children in fifteen receiving countries. We document large income gaps for first-generation immigrants that diminish in the second generation. Around half of the second-generation gap can be explained by differences in parental income, with the remainder due to differential rates of absolute mobility. The daughters of immigrants enjoy higher absolute mobility than daughters of locals in most destinations, while immigrant sons primarily enjoy this advantage in countries with long histories of immigration. Cross-country differences in absolute mobility are not driven by parental country-of-origin, but instead by destination labor markets and immigration policy.

Discovering young geniuses: the power of Olympiads in identifying STEM talent (with Ruchir Agarwal, and Patrick Gaule)

This paper examines the effectiveness of International Science Olympiads in identifying exceptional young talent in STEM fields. We have created an original database of Olympiad participants, encompassing all participants from five Olympiads during the period from 1959 to 2022, to analyse their long-term achievements, including the likelihood of obtaining doctoral degrees and winning prestigious scientific awards. The findings suggest that success in these science competitions, particularly in mathematics Olympiads, is a significant predictor of future scientific achievements.

The effect of education on determinants of urban household consumption and comparison in four major Chinese cities (with Lu Jiang, Xiaonan Shi, and Pu Yang)

Higher education levels not only improve income and career opportunities but also foster environmental awareness, impacting household energy consumption. To understand the interplay between education level, income level, subjective energy-saving awareness, and household energy consumption, we selected four representative Chinese cities: Beijing, Guangzhou, Xining, and Liaocheng, based on their per capita GDP ranking from high to low. These cities offer insights into geographical spatial patterns of residential energy consumption and carbon emissions across the east-west and south-north regions of China. We analysed survey data from 2886 households to assess the current situation of household energy consumption in the selected cities. By constructing a primary database of household energy consumption in each city, we integrated income levels and subjective energy conservation awareness into our analysis framework, specifically examining the impact of different education attainments on household energy consumption and its underlying mechanisms. Our preliminary findings reveal that income and energy-saving awareness play a mediating role in the relationship between education and household energy consumption.