Everybody Needs Good Neighbours? Evidence from Students’ Outcomes in England We estimate the effect of neighbours’ characteristics and prior achievements on teenage students’ educational and behavioural outcomes using census data on several cohorts of secondary school students in England. Our research design is based on changes in neighbourhood composition caused explicitly by residential migra...

PurposeWe respond to some challenges in the transition to Sustainable Development Goals by examining the correlations between mobile and inclusive development (quality of growth, poverty and inequality) in 93 developing countries for the year 2011. Design/methodology/approachMobile money service entails: ‘mobile used to pay bills’ and ‘mobile used to receive/send money’. Interactive Ordinary Le...

The purpose of this paper is to quantify the efficiency with which Australian universities utilise their teaching resources. The study estimates the cost efficiency of 36 universities over the period 1995-2002 using stochastic frontier analysis. The present study differs from previous cost and efficiency studies of Australian universities in two respects. First, it employs stochastic frontier a...

This paper examines the impacts of family inputs — i.e., maternal employment, child care and home learning — on the early development of British children. Using rich longitudinal data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study we estimate cognitive and non-cognitive achievement production functions that allow outcomes to depend on the history of family inputs and unobserved child endowments. We find e...

Peer Effects, Unobserved Factors and Risk Behaviours: An Analysis of Alcohol Abuse and Truancy among Adolescents The objective of this paper is to examine the factors which affect alcohol abuse and truancy among adolescents. We propose a new theoretical specification in which alcohol abuse and truancy appear as derived demands, given that they condition peer group and family acceptance, and we ...

In this paper we consider whether certain countries are particularly adept (or particularly poor) at getting children from disadvantaged homes to study for a bachelor’s degree. A series of university access models are estimated for four English speaking countries (England, Canada, Australia and the United States) which include controls for comparable measures of academic achievement at age 15. ...

Do Peers Affect Student Achievement? Evidence from Canada Using Group Size Variation We provide the first empirical application of a new approach proposed by Lee (2007) to estimate peer effects in a linear-in-means model. This approach allows to control for grouplevel unobservables and to solve the reflection problem. We investigate peer effects in student achievement in Mathematics, Science, F...

When one analyses the influence of social identity on scholastic effort, ethnic identity largely contributes to determine it. In this paper, ethnic identity is meant as the attachment to one’s cultural heritage and the adaptation to host societies; this allows considering how conflicting demands and social pressure from parents, peers, ethnic community and host societies influence children’s ef...

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) are two highly respected studies of school pupils’ academic achievement. English policymakers have been disappointed with school children’s performance on these tests, particularly in comparison to the strong results of young people from East Asia. In this paper we provide new insight i...

Drawing on a very rich data set from a recent cohort of PhD graduates, we examine the correlates and consequences of qualification and skills mismatch. We show that job characteristics such as the economic sector and the main activity at work play a fundamental direct role in explaining the probability of being well matched. However, the effect of academic attributes seems to be mainly indirect...