Childcare and early years

In this paper we evaluate the impact of a major school reform, that took place in the 1950s in Sweden, on educational attainment and earnings.

This paper reports on the short run impact of one of the U.K. government's flagship education policies, the Excellence in Cities (EiC) program.

his paper uses the measures of basic skills (or functional literacy) in the International Adult Literacy Survey to examine the impact of education and basic skills on earnings across a large number of countries.

The Government's plans for reforming Higher Education (HE) funding have been a source of great controversy. Much of this controversy has been focused on what the reforms will mean for students from different family income backgrounds, and on the levels of debt they may need to incur to go to higher education. Concern has also been raised about how graduates will be affected by these debt repayments throughout their working lives, as well as whether or not the funds raised will improve the situation of universities significantly. This Briefing Note addresses these issues, as well as describing the evolution of the proposed reforms to Higher Education funding in recent months. In doing this, we set out and explain the system which is most likely to be implemented if the HE Bill is passed, and discuss the ways in which students, graduates, and universities are likely to be affected. We also consider the possible effects on the taxpayer.

In this paper I summarize some recent developments in the literature on the econometrics of program evaluation.

Regression, matching, control function and instrumental variables methods for recovering the impact of education on individual earnings are reviewed for single treatment and sequential multiple treatments with and without heterogeneous returns.

This paper uses two sets of cross-country micro datasets to analyse individuals participation in voluntary and community activities and organisations.

We have compiled a non-technical and relatively brief policy summary of an extensive CEE research programme which has focused on the relative value of different academic and vocational qualifications in the British labour market, how this value differs for different subgroups of the population and how this value has changed over time.

In this commentary, IFS compares the reforms proposed by the two parties, looking at the effect on student and graduate finances, the distributional impact on households with different incomes, and the cost to the Exchequer and taxpayers in general.

This article uses factor models to identify and estimate the distributions of counterfactuals.

In the previous edition, we argued that governments might care about child poverty for reasons of equity and efficiency, and we introduced the concept of an equivalence scale as a way to help compare well-being across different sorts of households.

This paper evaluates the effects of a mjor educational reform in Sweden.

This briefing note is provided as evidence to the Work and Pensions Select Committee as to whether childcare could be provided for all parents who need it to help them to work. It looks at the ways in which this could be achieved.

The current Labour Government wants to reduce the level of child poverty in this country.

This commentary describes the changes to the structure of child-contingent support through the tax and benefit system since 1975. It also presents new results, which were produced to quantify explicitly the amount of government support for families with children, using representative samples of families from over the past three decades. With these data, it is possible to examine whether child-contingent support has become more or less progressive, or more or less slanted towards large families, lone-parents families or families with young children.