Entrepreneurship: Can the Jack-of-All-Trades Attitude be Aquired?

Entrepreneurs are believed to be the ultimate engine of modern economic systems. Yet, the study ofentrepreneurship suffers from the lack of consensus on the most crucial question: what makes anentrepreneur? A recent theory developed by Edward Lazear suggests that individuals mastering abalanced set of talents across different fields, i.e. the Jacks-of-All-Trades (JATs), have a highprobability of becoming entrepreneurs. In this paper, I investigate whether the JAT Attitude is just aninnate ability or a skill that can be trained to enhance individuals' chances of becoming entrepreneurs.Using panel techniques, I show that changes in the spread of knowledge across different fields do notincrease the probability of becoming an entrepreneur. This suggests that, if the JAT Attitude mattersfor entrepreneurship, it is an innate and time-invariant individual attribute, rather than a skill that canbe acquired.Entrepreneurship, Occupational Choice, Skills

What works in primary schools?

Olmo Silva reviews the evidence on the effectiveness of increasing resources, modifying teaching methods and introducing choice and competition. Policies to improve primary education can involve increasing the resources available to schools, modifying teaching methods or introducing elements of accountability, choice and competition into education 'markets'. Olmo Silva reviews the latest evidence on the effectiveness of these three broad areas of intervention.

Some Remarks on the Effectiveness of Primary Education Interventions

In this paper I survey the recent economics of education literature in order to identify which education policies can effectively improve the quality of primary schooling, as measured by pupil test-based achievements. Particular attention is devoted to the experience of England, a country which has made substantial investments over the past decade aimed at improving its primary education. Evidence suggests that broadly scoped resource-based programmes deliver less than more targeted policies. Additionally, a growing body of research shows that interventions that enhance choice and competition among education-service providers, and motivate teachers through pecuniary rewards, have some scope in raising education standards. I conclude my survey by discussing some broad concerns with modes of education provision centred on choice and competition, mainly pupil segregation along the lines of ability and family background.primary schools, resources, choice and competition, incentives

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

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

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

Targeting Non-Cognitive Skills to Improve Cognitive Outcomes: Evidence from a Remedial Education Intervention

A growing body of research highlights the importance of non-cognitive skills as determinants of young people's cognitive outcomes at school. However, little evidence exists about the effects of policies that specifically target students' non-cognitive skills as a way to improve educational achievements. In this paper, we shed light on this issue by studying a remedial education programme aimed at English secondary school pupils at risk of school exclusion and with worsening educational trajectories. The main peculiarity of this intervention is that it solely targets students' non-cognitive skills – such as self-confidence, locus of control, self-esteem and motivation – with the aim of improving pupils' records of attendance and end-of-compulsory-education (age 16) cognitive outcomes. We evaluate the effect of the policy on test scores in standardized national exams at age-16 using both least squares and propensity-score matching methods. Additionally, we exploit repeated observations on pupils’ test scores to control for unobservables that might affect students’ outcomes and selection into the programme. We find little evidence that the programme significantly helped treated youths to improve their age-16 test outcomes. We also find little evidence of heterogeneous policy effects along a variety of dimensions.cognitive and non-cognitive skills; policy evaluation; secondary schooling

Linking cities and entrepreneurship

Posted by Dr Olmo Silva, SERC and LSE Since the writings of Marshall and Schumpeter around a hundred years ago, entrepreneurs are considered a crucial ‘ingredient’ in promoting and sustaining economic growth. Paradoxically, the link between local entrepreneurship and economic dynamism is even more pronounced in today’s highly globalized world – dense local clusters of entrepreneurship are the real powerhouses of local modern economies, capable of leveraging knowledge spillovers and agglomeration forces to produce the ‘next big thing’ and project it into a global reach

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

New Technology in Schools: Is There a Payoff?

information and communication technology (ICT), pupil achievement