In October, the Prime Minister called for an inquiry into the student loan system for higher education (HE). In this briefing note, we focus on two of the more unpopular features of the current system. We explore government options for reducing the interest rates charged on student loans, from the current levels of RPI + 3% while studying and RPI + 0–3% (depending on income) after leaving university, and for reintroducing living-cost grants – which do not have to be repaid – for students from lower-income families. This briefing note will be submitted as evidence for the inquiry.

The old age provisions of the Medicaid program were designed to insure retirees against medical expenses. We estimate a structural model of savings and medical spending and use it to compute the distribution of lifetime Medicaid transfers and Medicaid valuations across currently single retirees.

We estimate a dynamic model of employment, human capital accumulation—including education, and savings for women in the United Kingdom, exploiting tax and benefit reforms, and use it to analyze the effects of welfare policy.

We present evidence on whether workers have social preferences by comparing workers' productivity under relative incentives, where individual effort imposes a negative externality on others, with their productivity under piece rates, where it does not.

I develop a model of marriage in which spouses decide on investments in child quality during marriage, and on the allocation of child custody should they divorce.

We present evidence on how farmers’ decisions to adopt a new crop relate to the adoption choices of their network of family and friends.

This paper develops a model of search and learning in marriage markets to analyze how a liberalization of divorce laws affects marriage market outcomes.

We present evidence from a firm level experiment in which we engineered an exogenous change in managerial compensation from fixed wages to performance pay based on the average productivity of lower-tier workers.

We analyze the role of the marriage contract.

This paper presents evidence on the social capital in one particular firm, as embodied in the friendship ties among its workers.

We present evidence on the effect of social connections between workers and managers on productivity in the workplace.

We consider a principal–agent model of adverse selection where, in order to trade with the principal, the agent must undertake a relationship-specific investment which affects his outside option to trade, i.e. the payoff that he can obtain by trading with an alternative principal.