Alissa is Professor of Economics and Director of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies at the UCL Institute of Education and a Research Fellow at the IFS. Her research interests cover a range of issues relating to education policy, inequality and poverty. Her current work is concerned with explaining the 'socio-economic gap' in child outcomes and in higher education participation; the importance of the development of cognitive and social skills in childhood for outcomes in adult life; and higher education funding policy. Her previous work has charted trends in income inequality, intergenerational income mobility, and child and pensioner poverty in the UK. She also has extensive experience in conducting a number of large-scale policy evaluations for government departments, including Education Maintenance Allowances, Employer Training Pilots, the Employment, Retention and Advancement demonstration, and Pathways to Work.
Education
MSc Economics, Birkbeck College, 1996
BA Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Balliol College, Oxford, 1993
Inequalities between children in these domains open up very early in life. At this online event we will discuss a number of questions. How large is the variation in early child development and in the environments that young children are raised in? What are the most important features of children’s early environment for their development?
The environment that children are raised in, and their development of cognitive, and social and emotional skills affect the subsequent trajectory of their lives. Inequalities between children in these domains open up very early in life.
Through the lottery of birth, children are born into different socio-economic circumstances and grow up in environments that are remarkably different from each other. This report looks at inequalities in early childhood in the UK.
This report considers the extent to which differences in parental characteristics explain gaps in cognitive and socio-emotional development between children at older ages.
This paper makes use of newly linked administrative education data from England to understand better the determinants of participation in higher education (HE) among individuals from low socio-economic backgrounds.
This article corrects 'The Distributional Impact of the 2012–13 Higher Education Funding Reforms in England', Fiscal Studies, Vol. 33, Issue 2, pp. 211–236.
In this article we assess whether there are differences in early measures of cognitive and socio-emotional development between children born to cohabiting and married couples, and if so, whether marriage is the cause of these differences.
This paper investigates the financial implications of the higher education funding regime to be introduced in English universities in September 2012. The analysis is based on simulated lifetime earnings profiles among graduates, linked to imputed information on parental incomes and institution and course choices.
This paper focuses on what the increase in resources directed at English universities arising from top-up fees means for the relative funding of English and Scottish undergraduates.
In this paper, we analyse the consequences and determinants of cognitive and non-cognitive (social) skills at age 7, using data for Great Britain from the National Child Development Study. This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, Chicago, January 2012, as part of a session on 'The Impact of Early Cognitive and Non-cognitive Skills on Later Outcomes'.
