Administrative Data and Economic Policy Evaluation

This paper looks at the strengths and weaknesses of using administrative data for economic policy evaluation. It does this by looking at how school administrative data has been used to assess school effectiveness and the impact of month of birth on educational outcomes with varying degrees of success. It concludes that if there is some natural experiment in the way the education is delivered or an education initiative is introduced, then schools’ administrative data offers the opportunity of answering questions of extreme policy interest in a robust way – even without rich background information on the students and their families.administrative data, evaluation methods, school league tables, month of birth, natural experiment

Ability, families, education and earnings in Britain

The paper estimates the returns to education for a cohort of individuals born in Britain in March 1958 who have been followed since birth until the age of 33. The data used has a wealth of information on family background including parental education, social class and interest shown in the child's education as well as measures of ability. These variables are typically missing in studies looking at the returns to schooling. In the paper we Ůd that the return to an additional year of full-time education for the UK population as a whole is somewhere between 5 to 7 per cent for men and 8 to 10 per cent for women even after correcting for the eĥcts of measurement error. The paper also presents evidence that the returns to an additional year of schooling in the UK are heterogeneous. The results from the paper suggest that individuals undertaking education involving some sort of formal qualification have significantly larger rates of return to an additional year of education than individuals who have obtained no formal education. Individuals whose highest educational qualification is an A level (the highest schooling qualification in the UK) appear to have the highest average return to an additional year of education at around 15 per cent for both men and women. There is also some evidence that individuals with lower tastes for education, have significantly higher marginal returns to education. The results of the paper suggest that recent IV estimates of the returns to schooling in the UK, which exceed typical OLS estimates, may overestimate the average marginal return for the population as a whole.

The impact of the 2006-07 HE finance reforms on HE participation (BIS research paper no.13)

"This report examines the effects of the package of reforms introduced by the Higher Education Act in 2006-07 on HE participation, using administrative data on all state school students in England, linked to HE records from all UK universities. [The researchers] start by documenting trends in HE participation between 2004-05 and 2007-08, considering not only overall participation rates, but also participation at “high status” institutions and participation amongst particular subgroups of interest." - exec. summary

Income support and staying in school: what can we learn from Australia's AUSTUDY experiment?

In Australia, as in most industrialised countries, there has been a dramatic increase in unemployment rates over the last three decades. The teenage labour market, in particular, has undergone significant structural changes which have resulted in large increases in the rate of unemployment among teenagers. The proportion of children staying on at school past the minimum leaving age and higher-education participation rates have also been rising over this period. Despite this, the overall full-time education participation of Australian teenagers remains low compared with that in most other OECD nations.

The impact of higher education finance on university participation in the UK (BIS research paper no.11)

In this paper we estimate the separate impacts of upfront fees, grants and maintenance loans on UK higher education participation. We use the panel data element of Labour Force Survey data on the university participation decisions of 18 year olds, covering the period 1992-2007, which saw great variation in HE finance, most importantly the introduction of up-front tuition fees and the abolition of student maintenance grants in 1998 and major reforms of 2004 in which maintenance grants were re-instated and up-front fees were replaced with deferred fees of £3000. To test the robustness of the results, and to help deal with potential measurement error, we create a pseudo-panel of participation by UK region over time and test a number of specifications. Our findings show that the impact of upfront tuition fees in 1998 had a small negative impact on participation among high income groups, while the package of reforms introduced in 2006 had no impact on participation, largely because tuition fees were accompanied by large increases in loans and grants

What determines private school choice? a comparison between the UK and Australia

This paper compares patterns of private school attendance in the UK and Australia. About 6.5% of school children in the UK attend a private school, while 33% do so in Australia. We use comparable household panel data from the two countries to model attendance at a private school at age 15 or 16 as a function of household income and other child and parental characteristics. As one might expect, we observe a strong effect of household income on private school attendance. The addition of other household characteristics reduces this income elasticity, and reveals a strong degree of intergenerational transmission in both countries, with children being 8 percentage points more likely to attend a private school if one of their parents attended one in the UK, and anywhere up to 20 percentage points more likely in Australia. The analysis also reveals significant effects of parental education level, political preferences, religious background and the number of siblings on private school attendance.

The Impact of Tuition Fees and Support on University

Understanding how policy can affect university participation is important for understanding how governments can promote human capital accumulation. In this paper, we estimate the separate impacts of tuition fees and maintenance grants on the decision to enter university in the UK. We use Labour Force Survey data covering 1992-2007, a period of important variation in higher education finance, which saw the introduction of up-front tuition fees and the abolition of maintenance grants in 1998, followed some eight years later by a shift to higher deferred fees and the reinstatement of maintenance grants. We create a pseudo-panel of university participation of cohorts defined by sex, region of residence and family background, and estimate a number of different specifications on these aggregated data. Our findings show that tuition fees have had a significant negative effect on participation, with a £1,000 increase in fees resulting in a decrease in participation of 3.9 percentage points, which equates to an elasticity of -0.14. Non-repayable support in the form of maintenance grants has had a positive effect on participation, with a £1,000 increase in grants resulting in a 2.6 percentage point increase in participation, which equates to an elasticity of 0.18. These findings are comparable to, but of a slightly lower magnitude than, those in the related US literature.university participation, higher education funding policies, tuition fees, maintenance grants, pseudo-panel

The demand for private schooling in England: the impact of price and quality

In this paper we use English school level data from 1993 to 2008 aggregated up to small neighbourhood areas to look at the determinants of the demand for private education in England from the ages of 7 until 15 (the last year of compulsory schooling). We focus on the relative importance of price and quality of schooling. However, there are likely to be unobservable factors that are correlated with private school prices and/or the quality of state schools that also impact on the demand for private schooling which could bias our estimates. Our long regional and local authority panel data allows us to employ a number of strategies to deal with this potential endogeneity. Because of the likely presence of incidental trends in our unobservables, we employ a double difference system GMM approach to remove both fixed effects and incidental trends. We find that the demand for private schooling is inversely related to private school fees as well as the quality of state schooling in the local area at the time families were making key schooling choice decisions at the ages of 7, 11 and 13. We estimate that a one standard deviation increase in the private school day fee when parents/students are making these key decisions reduces the proportion attending private schools by around 0.33 percentage points which equates to an elasticity of around -0.26. This estimate is only significant for choices at age 7 (but the point estimates are very similar at the ages of 11 and 13). At age 11 and age 13, an increase in the quality of local state secondary reduces the probability of attending private schools. At age 11, a one standard deviation increase in state school quality reduces participation in private schools by 0.31 percentage points which equates to an elasticity of -0.21. The effect at age 13 is slightly smaller, but still significant. Demand for private schooling at the ages of 8, 9, 10 and 12, 14 and 15 are almost entirely determined by private school demand in the previous year for the same cohort, and price and quality do not impact significantly on this decision other than through their initial influence on the key participation decisions at the ages of 7, 11 and 13.

The Role of Credit Constraints in Educational Choices: Evidence from NCDS and BCS70

Education