What does daylight-saving time actually save?

Posted by Dr Felix Weinhardt, SERC and LSE On Sunday Britain turned the clocks forward an hour - and summer time officially began. Mornings will be darker, evenings lighter. BST and other daylight-saving schemes are thought to reduce demand for energy (lighting in particular). But do they

Neighborhood quality and student performance

Children who grow up in deprived neighborhoods underperform at school and later in life but whether there is a causal link remains contested. This study estimates the effect of very deprived neighborhoods, characterized by a high density of social housing, on the educational attainment of fourteen years old students in England. To identify the causal impact, this study exploits the timing of moving into these neighborhoods. I argue that the timing can be taken as exogenous because of long waiting lists for social housing in high-demand areas. Using this approach, I find no evidence for effects on student performance

Do Neighbours Affect Teenage Outcomes? Evidence from Neighbourhood Changes in England

In this paper, we use census data on several cohorts of secondary school students in England matched to detailed information on place of residence to investigate the effect of neighbours' background characteristics and prior achievements on teenagers' educational and behavioural outcomes. Our analysis focuses on the age-11 to age-16 time-lapse, and uses variation in neighbourhood composition over this period that is driven by residential mobility. Exploiting the longitudinal nature and detail of our data, we are able to control for pupil unobserved characteristics, neighbourhood fixed-effects and time-trends, school-by-cohort unobservables, as well as students' observable attributes and prior attainments. Our results provide little evidence that neighbours' characteristics significantly affect pupil test score progression during secondary education. Similarly, we find that neighbourhood composition only exerts a small effect on pupil behavioural outcomes, such as general attitudes towards schooling, substance use and anti-social behaviour.Neighbourhood effects, cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes, secondary schools

Does geography matter? an empirical investigation into neighbourhood, peer effects and electricity consumption

This thesis consists of four distinct projects which sit at the crossroad between Labour, Education and Environmental Economics. The underlying and unifying theme is the examination of social and geographical inequalities using applied econometrics. In the first project, I estimate the effect of moving into a deprived high-density social housing neighbourhood on the educational attainments of teenagers in England. I exploit the timing of moving, which can be taken as exogenous because of long waiting lists for social housing in high-demand areas, to avoid the usual sorting problems. Using this strategy, I find no evidence for negative effects. The second project investigates the effect of neighbours' characteristics and prior achievements on teenagers' educational outcomes. The study relies on mover-induced variation in neighbourhood quality, whilst controlling for general gentrification trends and other unobservables. The results provide little evidence for significant effects on pupil test score progression. The third project looks at the size, significance and heterogeneity of ability peer effects in secondary schools in England. The methodological innovation is to identify ability peer effects using within-pupil-across-subject variation in students' test scores and peer prior achievements. The chapter shows that it is the low- and high-achievers, who account for most or all of the effect of average peer quality on the educational outcomes of other pupils and that this effect varies across genders. The final project presents -to the best of my knowledge- the first nationwide empirical assessment of residential electricity use in response to the timing of daylight for the US. Employing Geographical Information Systems (GIS), I calculate the solar times of sunrise and sunset for all locations in mainland US and show that two distinct sources of geographical variation can be used to estimate county-level responses in residential electricity consumption. Using both approaches I find that early sunrise is associated with lower residential electricity use in the North, but higher consumption in the South. This is a novel finding with potentially significant policy implications and I offer some suggestions about how future research should examine the behavioural channels that could cause these results

Top of the Class: The Importance of Ordinal Rank

This paper examines the long-run impact of ordinal rank during primary school on productivity using comprehensive English administrative data. Identification is obtained from variation in test score distributions across cohorts and subjects, such that the same score relative to the class mean can have different ranks. Conditional on cardinal measures of achievement, being ranked highly during primary school has large effects on secondary school achievement, with the impact of rank being more important for boys than girls. Using additional survey data we find that the development of confidence is the most likely mechanisms for this effect on task-specific productivity

Top of the Class: The Importance of Ordinal Rank

This paper establishes a new fact about educational production: ordinal academic rank during primary school has long-run impacts on later achievement that are independent from underlying ability. Using data on the universe of English school students, we examine a setting in which the same baseline score on a national tandardized test can correspond to different ranks among students situated in different primary school classes, where we calculate ranks using this baseline score. Institutional factors cause students to be re-assigned to a new set of secondary school peers and teachers that are unaware of the student's prior ranking. We find large and significant positive effects on test scores and subject choices during secondary school from experiencing a high primary school rank, conditional on the underlying primary baseline score. The effects are especially large for boys, contributing to an observed gender gap in end-of-high school STEM subject choices. Merged survey data suggest that the development of confidence is a likely mechanism

The importance of rank position

We find an individual’s rank within their reference group has effects on later objective outcomes. To evaluate the impact of local rank, we use a large administrative dataset tracking over two million students in England from primary through to secondary school. Academic rank within primary school has sizable, robust and significant effects on later achievement in secondary school, conditional on national test scores. Moreover we find boys gain four times more in later test scores from being top compared to girls. We provide evidence for a mechanism using matched survey data, which shows that rank affects an individual’s self-concept. The paper discusses other potential channels but concludes that malleable non-cognitive skills such as confidence and belief in own ability are most likely to generate these results. We put forward a basic model where rank effects costs and effort allocation when faced with multiple tasks. We believe this is the first large-scale study to show large and robust effects of rank position on objective outcomes of that have consequences in the labour market

Towards an Economic Analysis of Routing in Payment Channel Networks

Payment channel networks are supposed to overcome technical scalability limitations of blockchain infrastructure by employing a special overlay network with fast payment confirmation and only sporadic settlement of netted transactions on the blockchain. However, they introduce economic routing constraints that limit decentralized scalability and are currently not well understood. In this paper, we model the economic incentives for participants in payment channel networks. We provide the first formal model of payment channel economics and analyze how the cheapest path can be found. Additionally, our simulation assesses the long-term evolution of a payment channel network. We find that even for small routing fees, sometimes it is cheaper to settle the transaction directly on the blockchain.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, SERIAL '17 Worksho