Follow us
Publications Commentary Research People Events News Resources and Videos About IFS
Home People Sarah Cattan
Sarah Cattan

Sarah Cattan

Associate Director

CV
Alternative webpage
ORCID
0000-0001-7339-7051
Education

PhD Economics, University of Chicago, 2012

MA Economics, University of Chicago, 2007

BA Economics and Political Science (Magna Cum Laude), Columbia University, 2005

Sarah is an Associate Director in the Education and Skills sector. She joined the IFS in 2012 and currently holds a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship to study child development and household behaviour in developed and developing countries. Sarah’s research interests include the origins of inequality and the role of human capital played in driving inequalities within and across generations. In the recent past, she has conducted projects looking at the determinants of early childhood development, the impact of early childhood and education policies, and the gender wage gap.

Academic outputs

Journal article | Fiscal Studies , Volume 42, Issue 1
Mortality Inequality in England over the Past 20 Years
In this paper, we study the evolution of age-group- and gender-specific mortality and mortality inequality in England between 2003 and 2016, by comparing small geographic areas ranked by deprivation and grouped into bins of similar population size.
IFS Working Paper W21/06
The short- and long-term effects of student absence: evidence from Sweden
Despite the relatively uncontested importance of promoting school attendance in the policy arena, little evidence exists on the causal e ect of school absence on long-run socio-economic outcomes. We address this question by combining historical and administrative records for cohorts of Swedish ...

Reports and comment

Report
Family time use and home learning during the COVID-19 lockdown
The COVID-19 school closures forced children and parents to make unprecedented changes to their daily routines. Including the summer holidays, most children will have had a five-and-a-half-month break from physically attending school by the time they returned in September.
External publication
The long shadow of deprivation: Differences in opportunities across England
A socially mobile country provides equal opportunities for everyone, across big cities and small towns, and regardless of whether your parents are rich or poor. This report makes use of newly linked administrative data on all state-educated pupils born between 1986 and 1988 to follow a group of ...

Presentations

Presentation
Encouraging Girls’ Engagement With And Uptake Of Maths And Physics At A-Level
Girls are aware of the benefits of STEM careers, but fear they are male-dominated.
Presentation
Free childcare and parents' labour supply in England
This presentation was given by Sarah Cattan, Institute for Fiscal Studies, at the event "Childcare policy, maternal employment, and the UK policy debate: examining the evidence" on 2 December 2016.