There is growing interest in preconception health as a crucial period for influencing not only pregnancy outcomes, but also future maternal and child health, and prevention of long-term medical conditions.
The Augar Review – released yesterday – was wide reaching in its scope. Most importantly, the review suggests an important raft of changes to the further education sector and increases the power and scope of the post-18 education regulator, the Office for Students (as we discussed yesterday ). While these are the most significant features, there were also several changes to the student loan system that we untangle here. We confirm that the overall package of changes significantly reduces average debt while being broadly cost-neutral. It achieves that by extracting a large amount of money in future student loan repayments from middle-earning graduates.
Econometrics has traditionally revolved around point identi cation. Much effort has been devoted to finding the weakest set of assumptions that, together with the available data, deliver point identifi cation of population parameters, finite or infi nite dimensional that these might be. And point identifi cation has been viewed as a necessary prerequisite for meaningful statistical inference. The research program on partial identifi cation has begun to slowly shift this focus in the early 1990s, gaining momentum over time and developing into a widely researched area of econometrics.
The Augar Review of Post-18 education is the first comprehensive review of both the Further Education (FE) and Higher Education (HE) sectors and has been eagerly awaited. This note provides our immediate reaction.
We are in the midst of major changes to local government funding – both its level and the system for raising and distributing it. This note brings together some of the key findings of our research on this topic and highlights where to find further information.
Advertising of high fat, salt or sugar (HFSS) food and drink during children’s television programmes has been banned in the UK since 2007. The Government has recently announced that they will consult on further advertising restrictions for products high in fat, salt and sugar on TV.
To perform Bayesian analysis of a partially identified structural model, two distinct approaches exist: standard Bayesian inference, which assumes a single prior for the structural parameters, including the non-identified ones; and multiple-prior Bayesian inference, which assumes full ambiguity for the non-identified parameters. The prior inputs considered by these two extreme approaches can often be a poor representation of the researcher’s prior knowledge in practice.
"I would not begin to claim that the present economic and political settlement is anywhere near perfect", writes Paul Johnson, "but over the last 50 years it has delivered far more than we ever give it credit for."
The tax and benefit system is a key tool for a government trying to reduce inequality. In this briefing note, we examine the effects that cash benefits and taxes had on UK inequality in 2016–17.
Rachel Griffith tells Times Higher Education how economists can be more engaging and accessible in the way we describe our work, and how Brexit could change the way we eat
This research explored the prevalence of gifting in the general population and how it varied between different groups, based on a new quantitative survey was conducted with a representative sample of adults in Great Britain. The survey also explored the nature of gifting – including the number and value of gifts given, who they were given to, and the motivations for doing so – as well as awareness of inheritance tax rules and exemptions.
This paper describes a method for carrying out non-asymptotic inference on partially identifi ed parameters that are solutions to a class of optimization problems. The optimization problems arise in applications in which grouped data are used for estimation of a model's structural parameters. The parameters are characterized by restrictions that involve the population means of observed random variables in addition to the structural parameters of interest. Inference consists of finding con fidence intervals for the structural parameters. Our method is non-asymptotic in the sense that it provides a fi nite-sample bound on the difference between the true and nominal probabilities with which a confi dence interval contains the true but unknown value of a parameter. We contrast our method with an alternative non-asymptotic method based on the median-of-means estimator of Minsker (2015). The results of Monte Carlo experiments and an empirical example illustrate the usefulness of our method.
There exists a useful framework for jointly implementing Durbin-Wu-Hausman exogeneity and Sargan-Hansen overidenti cation tests, as a single arti cial regression. This note sets out the framework for linear models and discusses its extension to non-linear models. It also provides an empirical example and some Monte Carlo results.
This report introduces the IFS Deaton Review, setting out some key background facts, questions and puzzles that will be addressed over the next five years.
If the world can get to net zero in the second half of this century we should be able to avoid some of the worst consequences of climate change. The UK should play its part.
