This paper looks at how pupils’ enjoyment of the subjects they study is affected by the ability groups in which they are placed. Using data from the Millennium Cohort Study, which follows a sample of children born in the UK between 2000 and 2002, it finds those in a low ability group were less likely … Read more
Does ability grouping affect UK primary school pupils’ enjoyment of Maths and English?
Dynastic Human Capital, Inequality and Intergenerational Mobility
The transmission of human capital between generations has been much studied, but most research has focused on what parents pass on to their children. This study creates a much fuller picture of these effects by examining data on four generations of extended families in Sweden. It concludes previous research has very much underestimated the influence … Read more
Long-term labor market returns to upper secondary school track choice: Leveraging idiosyncratic variation in peers’ choices
This study looks at the possible benefits and disadvantages of choosing a vocational rather than an academic track in upper secondary education. While supporters of vocational education and training (VET) say it can provide a safety net for those at risk of dropping out of education or failing to enter the labour market, critics say … Read more
Educational tracking and personality formation: Evidence from a dual system
Research on the effects of educational selection has tended to focus on how it affects academic development and achievement. This project asks a different question: does the educational track on which we are placed as teenagers affect the development of personality traits? Personality traits continue to develop throughout the adolescent and early adult years, and … Read more
Stressful Life Events, Differential Vulnerability, and Depressive Symptoms: Critique and New Evidence
This paper considers whether women and less well-educated individuals are more vulnerable to the impacts of stressful life events on mental health. It finds they are not. Taking a new approach to researching life stress using data from a UK household survey, the research sets out to replicate and then go beyond previous work which … Read more
Aggressive behavior, emotional, and attention problems across childhood and academic attainment at the end of primary school
This research assesses whether aggressive behavior and emotional problems from early childhood onwards are related to academic attainment at the end of primary education, and whether these links are independent of attention problems. The researchers make use of data on 2546 children participating in a longitudinal birth cohort in Rotterdam to look at aggressive behavior, … Read more
Gendered retirement pathways across lifecourse regimes
This study analyses data on 1600 women and 1100 men over a 12-year period in 11 countries to assess the influence of institutional and individual factors on retirement decisions in different settings. It finds the retirement pathways of both men and women vary within and between welfare regimes and that they are not uniformly ‘gendered.’ … Read more
Testing the association between the early parent–child relationship and teacher reported socio-emotional difficulties at 11 years: a quantile mediation analysis
This paper investigates the strength of association behind well documented links between early parenting factors and later adolescent mental health problems. It goes on to consider the role of language skills at school entry in mediating those links. The research makes use of from the UK’s Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) to look into the first … Read more
Reallocation effects of the minimum wage
We investigate the wage, employment, and reallocation effects of the introduction of a nationwide minimum wage in Germany that affected 15% of all employees. Based on identification designs that exploit variation in exposure across individuals and local areas, we find that the minimum wage raised wages but did not lower employment. It also led to … Read more
Between communism and capitalism: long-term inequality in Poland, 1892–2015
This paper looks at the evolution of inequality in Poland from the late 19th Century to the early 21st Century, by constructing the long-term distribution of income in Poland from combining tax, household survey and national accounts data. It documents a U-shaped evolution of inequalities from the end of the 19th century until today: (i) … Read more