Professor Alissa Goodman

Using a simple decomposition analysis, we show that around two thirds of the socio-economic gap in attainment at age 16 can be accounted for by long-run family background characteristics and prior ability, suggesting that circumstances and investments made considerably earlier in the child's life explain the majority of the gap in test scores between young people from rich and poor families.

We find that parental cognitive ability is a significant predictor of children's cognitive ability; moreover, it explains one sixth of the socio-economic gap in those skills, even after controlling for a rich set of demographic, attitudinal and behavioural factors.

We use unique workplace and employee-level data to evaluate a major UK government pilot program to increase qualification-based, employer-provided training for low-qualified employees.

We find a very strong correlation between cognitive ability across generations, as well as a strong relationship between family socio-economic status and cognitive ability.

The online appendix for IFS working paper W10/15, 'The role of attitudes and behaviours in explaining socio-economic differences in attainment at age 16'.

Online appendix for IFS working paper W10/16, 'Explaining the socio-economic gradient in child outcomes: the intergenerational transmission of cognitive skills'.

Using a simple decomposition analysis, we show that around two thirds of the socio-economic gap in attainment at age 16 can be accounted for by long-run family background characteristics and prior ability.

In this Briefing Note, we critically appraise the government's assertion that cohabiting couples are more likley to seperate than married couples.

This paper makes use of newly linked administrative data to better understand the determinants of higher education participation amongst individuals from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

IFS researchers highlight some of the trade-offs that would be involved in reforming the current system of fees and loans applying to full-time undergraduate study

This Commentary documents in some detail how children's cognitive and social development differs between married and cohabiting parents, and provides a preliminary assessment of the extent to which such differences might be due to a causal effect of marriage itself.

This report examines the extent to which the aspirations, attitudes and behaviour of parents and children can help explain why poor children typically do worse at school than children from richer backgrounds. It is based on the analysis of a number of large-scale longitudinal data sources capturing groups of children in the UK from early childhood through to late adolescence.