The Costs of Urban Property Crime

This paper estimates the impact of recorded domestic property crime on property prices in the London area. Crimes in the Criminal Damage category have a significant negative impact on prices. Burglaries have no measurable impact on prices, even after allowing for the potential dependence of burglary rates on unobserved property characteristics. A one-tenth standard deviation decrease in the local density of criminal damage adds 1 per cent to the price of an average Inner London property. One explanation we offer here is that vandalism, graffiti and other forms of criminal damage motivate fear of crime in the community and may be taken as signals or symptoms of community instability and neighbourhood deterioration in general.property prices, crime, social disorder, spatial econometrics

Faith Primary Schools: Better Schools or Better Pupils?

We provide estimates of the effect of attending a Faith school on educational attainment progress during the Primary education phase in England. We argue that there are no credible instruments for Faith school attendance. Instead, we control for selection on religious schooling by tracking pupils over time and comparing attainments of students who exhibit different levels of commitment to religious education through their choice of Secondary school and residence. Our findings suggest that, once family preferences and selection into religious education are controlled for, Faith schools have only a very small effect on pupil educational progression in Primary school, this effect being between zero and under one-percentile on test scores at age 11, conditional on scores at age 7.Education, religion, faith schools, educational attainment

Mobility and School Disruption

We consider the influence that mobile pupils have on the academic achievements of other pupils in English primary schools. We find that immobile pupils in year-groups (à la US "grades") that experience high pupil entry rates progress less well academically between ages 8 and 11 than pupils in low-mobility year groups (grades), even within the same school. The disruptive externalities of mobility are statistically significant, but actually very small in terms of their educational impact. An increase in annual entry rates from 0 to 10% (a 4 standard deviation change) would set the average incumbent pupil back by between 1 and 2 weeks, or about 4% of one standard deviation of the gain in pupil achievement between ages 7 and 11.pupil mobility, pupil achievement, externalities

Unequal Britain: How Real Are Regional Disparities?

Average earnings vary widely across the regions of Britain, a fact that has prompted many decades of policies aimed at reducing regional disparities. But as Henry Overman and Steve Gibbons demonstrate, such variation reveals little, especially if we ignore regional differences in the cost of living and availability of local amenities.wage, disparities, labour,Britain, spatial equilibrium, amenity value, housing market

Peer Effects and Pupil Attainment: Evidence from Secondary School Transition

It is a common belief that children will thrive if educated amongst better class and schoolmates. It is a belief that guides many parents in their choice of school, and has important implications for policy on school choice and organisation. Many studies have tried to measure this 'peer-group' effect, but the enterprise is plagued by conceptual and empirical difficulties. In this study, we use the population of state Secondary school pupils in England to tease out how pupil attainments at age 14 respond to differences in the prior, age-11 attainments of their current school grade peer-group. Data on home addresses and school attendance allow us to compare outcomes of children who live in the same street, or who attended the same Primary school up to age 11, but then move on to different Secondary schools with different peer-group quality. These 'peer-group' effects seem to exist, but they are small in magnitude - a 1 s.d. increase in peer-group prior attainments allows a pupil to improve their own score by barely 0.08 of a standard deviation. We tackle various gnarly empirical problems arising in regression models of pupil attainments that incorporate individual and group prior attainments as explanatory variables. Estimates from such models are seriously biased by transient components in prior pupil attainments, correlation between current and prior peer-group characteristics and by ability sorting into Secondary schooling. We address these issues by using teachers predictions as instruments for prior attainments, defining a pupil's current peer-group in terms of those school mates with whom he or she has had no contact in the past, and by predicting current peer-group attainments with the productivity of their origin Primary schools, measured by the gain in attainments of different cohorts between ages 7 and 11.Pupil Attainment, Secondary Schools, Peer Effects

Are Schools Drifting Apart? Intake Stratification in English Secondary Schools

The issue of social segregation in schools has seen a recent resurgence of interest - in the US, UK and internationally - as the debate rages on about whether policies that expand families' freedom to choose amongst schools encourage divergence or convergence in the types of pupil different schools admit. Most attention has been focussed on segregation along lines of ethnic or social background. Yet, the real consideration that seems to be in the back of most people's minds is the issue of segregation or stratification of schools along lines of pupil ability. We look explicitly at this issue using data on the population of pupils entering Secondary school in England from 1996 to 2002. Our study does highlight wide disparities between peer-group ability in different schools. But we also find that, contrary to popular opinion, almost nothing has changed over these years in terms of the way pupils of different age-11 abilities are sorted into different Secondary schools.School Segregation, Pupil Ability

School Quality, Child Wellbeing and Parents Satisfaction

Researchers in economics of education usually assume that parents choose schools for their high academic performance, with some support from revealed preference evidence based on local house prices. However, anecdotal evidence and common sense suggest that school quality is not one-dimensional and that parents and children are concerned about other school factors related to pupil wellbeing. In this paper we consider whether parental notions of school quality are based on academic standards, and whether these notions are aligned with the wellbeing of the children. To do so, we use direct information on stated perceptions in the Longitudinal Survey of Young People in England (LSYPE) matched to UK administrative records on pupil achievements. Our results suggest that test score based measures of school quality tend to dominate parents' perceptions of educational excellence. However, school quality along this dimension is not strongly associated with pupil happiness and enjoyment of the learning environment.School Quality, Wellbeing, Happiness and Satisfaction, Subjective Measures

Faith Primary Schools: Better Schools or Better Pupils?

We provide estimates for the effect of attending a Faith school on educational achievement using a census of primary school pupils in England. We argue that there are no credible instruments for Faith school attendance in this context. Instead, we partially control for selection into religious schooling by tracking pupils over time and comparing attainments of students who exhibit different levels of commitment to religious education through their choice of secondary school and residence. Using this approach, we find only a small advantage from Faith primary schooling, worth about 1 percentile on age-11 test scores. Moreover, this is linked to autonomous admissions and governance arrangements, and not to religious character of the schools. We then go on to show that our estimates vary substantially across pupil subgroups that exhibit different levels of sorting on observable characteristics into Faith schooling, and provide bounds on what the 'Faith school effect' would be in the absence of sorting and selection. Pupils with a high degree of observable-sorting into Faith schools have an age-11 test score advantage of up to 2.7 percentiles. On the other hand, pupils showing a very low degree of sorting on observables have zero or negative gains. It appears that most of the apparent advantage of Faith school education in England can be explained by differences between the pupils who attend these schools and those who do not.faith school, primary schools, pupil achievement