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Economics of Education Research and Its Role in the Making of Education Policy

Author(s): Stephen Machin

Source: Fiscal Studies , March 2014, Vol. 35, No. 1 (March 2014), pp. 1-18

Published by: Wiley

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https://www.jstor.org/stable/24440343

FISCAL STUDIES, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 1-18 (2014) 0143-5671

Economies of Education Research and Its Role

in the Making of Education Policy*

Stephen Machin!

fUniversity College London; Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics

(s.machin(a),ucl. ac. uk)

Abstract

This paper is based on my 2013 IFS Annual Lecture and it explores the reasons for the substantial interest that economists currently have in education research. To do so, it sets the economics of education field in its historical context, and explores a number of reasons why the research area has grown by so much in recent years. The role of economic research in the making of education policy has also increased through time, for some of the same reasons, and this has played a significant part in the use of evidence based policy in a range of areas of education.

Policy points

• The economics of education has become a resurgent and growing field in recent years.

• The renewed research effort reflects a number of complementary factors. • A consequence of the significantly larger body of research has been a

greater involvement by economists in education policy.

"This paper is based on the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) Annual Lecture, delivered by Professor Stephen Machin on 15 October 2013. Some of it updates, lurther develops and sometimes re-rehearses themes and arguments from some of his earlier papers on economics of education research (Machin, 2008; Dearden, Machin and Vignoles, 2009; Machin, 2013).

Keywords: economics of education; education policy. JEL classification number: 120.

3 2014 The Author

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Fiscal Studies

I. Introduction

The economics of education has become one of the main fields of empirical economics. In the past, some would classify it as a part of labour economics, and whilst a lot of work in the area draws upon the skills and methods of labour economists, it has successfully established itself as a research field of its own. There are good reasons for this, and I will discuss some of them in this paper.

At the same time, and for related complementary reasons, economic approaches to education and research findings have started to play a bigger role in education policy. In the wider context, this reflects a greater demand for 'evidence-based' policy, not just in education but in many areas of government policy, and economic methods and research are well suited to this.

The economics of education is an area with a (reasonably) long history, but one whose importance as a field of study has tended to fluctuate through time. I will therefore begin by placing education research by economists into its historical context within the economics discipline. Also in Section II, I will lay out some evidence showing how the importance of education research has changed through time and how there has been a big upsurge in the area in the recent past. I will then move on to look in Section III at reasons and explanations for what I will characterise as the renewed research effort in this area.

It is no coincidence that findings from this burgeoning economics of education field have become more relevant for education policy. I will focus on the reasons for this in Section IV, again asking why and giving examples from education policy in England. In doing so, I hope to offer a critical appraisal of the usefulness of economics of education research for education policy in different settings.

II. The upsurge of economics of education research

1. Historical context

In discussing the current position, it is useful to begin by tracing back the origins of the economics of education as a significant field within modern economics to a number of developments made in the 1950s and 1960s by US economists. The key innovative nature of these contributions was to apply analytical modelling tools from economics to education questions. Probably the two most well known of these were Becker's (1964) application of utility theory to education acquisition in his human capital approach and Mincer's

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Economies of education research and education policy

(1958) development of the earnings function through which one can empirically assess the wage premium attached to higher levels of schooling.1

At the time, Becker's notion that individuals adopt an expected cost benefit analysis in determining whether to invest in higher education levels - and in doing so build up their stock of human capital - was controversial in some quarters. In particular, the idea that people would invest in education in a not dissimilar way to the way in which firms might invest in machines was subject to criticism.2 Nonetheless, the human capital approach has now become a cornerstone of the field and it has become the orthodoxy. Interestingly, this development has been taken up in other areas outside of economics, and in the policy environment.3 The human capital approach and the empirical earnings function have come to be used very widely in many areas of economics, and the economics of education has become recognised as a field of specialisation in its own right, with large volumes of research taking place in recent times.

2. Research trends over time

The contributions referred to above spawned a large expansion of economic research done by economists in the 1960s and 1970s. Not only were the human capital work by Becker and other prominent contributions from Schultz (1961 and 1963) and Ben-Porath (1967) a driver of other theoretical work emphasising different contexts of human capital (such as the work of Nelson and Phelps (1966), Bowles and Gintis (1975) and Blaug (1976)), but they were also a factor in generating alternative theoretical contributions where education investments are undertaken for signalling reasons (the classic exposition being Spence (1973)).4

Similarly, the original Mincer earnings function was the seminal contribution to what would become a huge area of research in economics where earnings returns to schooling are estimated from data coming from a wide range of settings. Some of the key contributions in the 1970s were made by Mincer's (1974) inclusion of experience in the earnings function and by the estimates of returns to education of Psacharopoulos and Hinchliffe (1973) and Layard and Psacharopoulos (1974). The supply and demand sides of the market for education were also highlighted in Tinbergen's (1974) classic exposition of the 'race' between education demand and supply.

'Of course, education features in the writings of economists well before this (for example, Adam Smith's connecting of productivity differences across nations to schooling levels), but the key feature of the developments I mention was the application of formal economic analytics to the education sphere.

2See the discussion in Kiker (1966).

3See the discussion of the impact on different disciplinary approaches in the edited volume of Furlong and Lawn (2010).

4See also Spence (1974) and Stiglitz (1975).

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Fiscal Studies

TABLE 1

Economies of education publications in leading economics journals

1950-59 1960-69

Decade

1970-79 1980-89 1990-99 2000-09

Number of papers 3 37 78 38 82 134

Note: Decade counts of publications with the word/phrase 'education', 'schooling', 'school' or 'human capital' in the title in the following journals: American Economic Review; Econometrica; Economica; Economic Journal; Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics; RAND Journal of Economics; Review of Economic Studies. (Source: JSTOR, Ingenta Connect, Business Source Premier, Blackwell Synergy.) Only full articles and excludes the following: Papers and Proceedings papers (from American Economic Review)-, comments; replies; errata; corrigenda; round tables; notes; articles where the word 'school' means school of thought.

FIGURE 1

Publications in the economics of education field in top economics journals 20-1

® n

E 10

0 I 1 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2009

Note: Source and definition as described in note to Table 1.

After this 'heyday' of 1960s and 1970s research activity, the 1980s saw something of a decline in research volumes. But in the recent past, there has been a big resurgence of interest in education research amongst economists. This is shown in Table 1, which records the number of publications in the economics of education field in the economics profession's leading journals across six decades, beginning with the 1950s and running through to the 2000s. The articles were selected on a consistent basis through time if their title included one of the words/phrases 'school', 'schooling', 'education' or 'human capital'. There is a very clear pattern shown by the numbers in the

D 2014 The Author

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Economies of education research and education policy

table, the dominant aspect of which is the considerable rise over time. In the 1950s, there were three articles over the whole decade. By the 2000s, this had risen to 134. The considerable rise in interest in the 1960s and 1970s is

evident, with 37 articles appearing in the 1960s and this more than doubling to 78 in the 1970s. There is then a drop in the 1980s, when the number falls back to close to the 1960s number. After that, the increase is rapid and large. Figure 1 shows the year-on-year numbers; it is evident that the big resurgence of recent interest began in the mid-1990s.

Figure 2 shows a chart derived from the Google Books Ngram Viewer, a facility that can be used to display graphs showing how often selected phrases have occurred in a corpus of books over time. The chart (from Leuven (2013)) shows what happens if the phrase 'human capital' is entered into the viewer. The increased usage frequency of the phrase is extremely pronounced. Before 1960 through the 20th century, it did not appear. From the 1960s onwards, its occurrence shows a very marked and rapid increase.

We can take from this (largely descriptive) exercise that the economics of education research field, and the research questions and issues it studies, have risen in importance over time, after being kick-started by the application of standard economic modelling tools to questions of education. The rise has been very rapid and the field has been one of the fastest growing in economics over the recent past.5

FIGURE 2

Google Ngram on 'human capital ' 0.0004% -

0.0003% -

o c

® 0.0002% cr a>

0.0001 % -

0.0000% - ~ I I I I I I I I I I 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

Note: From Leuven (2013).

50ther types of (again descriptive) evidence can be furnished to support this. Machin (2013), in a paper

closely related to this one, reports information on changes over time (between 1980 and 2013) in the number of education research papers presented at the European Association of Labour Economists; these numbers also show significant increases through time.

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Fiscal Studies

III. Reasons for the renewed research effort

In this section, I move on to consider some of the reasons for what I term the renewed research effort from economists to study education. The position I take on these reasons is that there are several and that no single one dominates. In fact, a number of important factors have combined, often in a complementary manner, to generate a sizeable increase in the volume of research work on education done by economists.

Acknowledging that this may not be a definitive list, I choose to focus on six key reasons for the increase in research volumes. These are:

higher levels of education acquisition; a growing evidence base that education matters for economic and social outcomes, that it affects a wide range of these and that in many cases its effect is becoming more marked over time; education being studied in other research areas in economics; methodological innovations that are particularly suited and well matched to the study of education questions; more and better-quality data; the quest for evidence-based policy.

In the remainder of this section, I go through (i) to (v) in turn. Reason (vi) is the focus of Section IV, where I will consider how the increased research endeavour links to the role of economists in the making of education policy.

1. Higher levels of education acquisition

Across the world, individuals are spending more time in the education system and are obtaining higher levels of qualifications than before. This feature of most economies is an obvious reason why education has been studied more. To illustrate the point, Figure 3 shows numbers on the attainment of tertiary education for 25- to 64-year-olds and for 25- to 34 year-olds in 2011 from the OECD's most recent Education at a Glance,6 It is clear that tertiary attainment levels are very high in some countries (such as Japan and Korea) and that they are high in many places - the OECD average is over 30 per cent for the 25- to 64-year-olds. What is more - as the triangle denoting the younger cohort lying above the square for the 25- to 64-year olds in almost all countries shows - the percentage with a tertiary education has mostly been rising through time as higher education has expanded across the globe.

Figure 4 shows trends in higher education participation in Great Britain since 1981. Back then, the participation rate in higher education for the

'OECD, 2013.

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Economies of education research and education policy

FIGURE 3

Percentage of population that has attained tertiary education across the OECD, 2011

I' iiill'I

a 25- to 34-year-olds ■ 25- to 64-year-olds

init'ti 11

rliii. a

^ JC CO o > CD O N

Source: OECD, 2013.

FIGURE 4

Trends in higher education participation

N /

HEIPR

1981

Note: The age participation index (API) is the number of domiciled young people (aged under 21) who are initial entrants to full-time and sandwich undergraduate courses as a percentage of the 18- to 19-year old GB population. The API was discontinued in 2001 and replaced by the higher education initial participation rate (HEIPR), which has a different definition as it covers entrants to higher education from different age groups (the one reported here covers ages 17 to 20).

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Fiscal Studies

appropriate age cohort (i.e. the flow of individuals participating at that time) was just over 10 per cent. It went up very rapidly indeed during the 1990s expansion and has continued to rise, lying at about 35 per cent at the end of the first decade of the 2000s.7

2. Education and economic and social outcomes

A significant body of work has shown that education matters, and has sometimes become increasingly important over time, as a determinant of key economic and social outcomes. Following the Mincer approach and its subsequent development, a lot of research has focused on estimating the wage premium - or rate of return - associated with higher levels of education. Some of the key methodological issues to do with accurately pinning down the size of these returns are contained in Card's (1999) survey.

What is clear from a large body of evidence is that the more educated do have significantly higher earnings. Some descriptive material showing this for a number of OECD countries is reported in Figure 5. The figure shows that wages are higher (often by very large magnitudes) for people with a tertiary education as compared with a group of people who completed an upper secondary education but did not go on to tertiary education. The figure also shows a wage penalty for those with completed education below the upper secondary level.

What is more, in some countries (notably the US and the UK), this positive wage return to schooling has been rising over time. This is despite the rapid increase in the supply of more highly educated workers that has occurred (and is documented above). Thus, as the wages of the more educated have risen, demand must have risen faster than supply - in Tinbergen's terminology (from his classic article cited above) demand has won the race over recent periods.8

The simultaneous increases in relative employment and in wages for the more educated (and thus the increased demand) are shown for the UK in Table 2. The table shows a very rapid increase in the graduate employment share amongst 25- to 44-year-olds between 1980 and 2013, with the share going up from 7 per cent to 38 per cent. The relative wage of graduates rises from 1.40 times that of a comparable non-graduate to 1.52 over the same period.

Thus one possible source of greater research interest among economists is that the economic returns to education have risen. Whilst education

'The early 1990s featured changes in institutional status (i.e. the 'new' universities) as part of this expansion.

SA by-now large body of work has documented relative demand shifts in favour of the more educated

or skilled: see, among others, Katz and Autor (1999), Machin and Van Reenen (2008) and Acemoglu and Autor (2010).

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Economies of education research and education policy

acquisition has gone up, the value of those investments has also increased. Research has studied wider benefits of education as well.9 This work very

3.0

2.5

2.0

1.5

1.0

FIGURE 5

Relative earnings of 25- to 64-year-old workers by education across the OECD, 2011

^ Below upper secondary education ■mm Tertiary education

— Upper secondary or post-secondary non-tertiary education

iliiininiiiMirnii 0.5

0.0 I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I

1 a 111 3 SI £ § |l! § ai § § DC £L 0^ ^ (0 £ .-e ^ < cd^q«n

.-£ x: ^ x -o Q 0> M 5 -ora Jj ® O Z w ®

Source: OECD, 2013.

3 <D > .tr in N O F S O CO 3 °

FIGURE 5

Relative earnings of 25- to 64-year-old workers by education across the OECD, 2011

TABLE 2

Graduate employment shares and graduate/non-graduate wage ratios, UK

Aged 25-44 in employment 1980 General Household 2015 Labour Force

Survey Survey

Graduate share in employment 0.07 0.38

Graduate/Non-graduate wage ratio3 1.40 1.52

'Adjusts for composition change using statistical regressions controlling for age, age squared and gender.

For a comprehensive review of work on the wider benefits of education, see Lochner (2011).

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10 Fiscal Studies

clearly indicates that the benefits are not just confined to labour market outcomes. Evidence shows more education to be connected to improved health,10 to lower crime11 and to good citizenship.12 Moreover, there is strong evidence of an intergenerational spillover as the children of more educated parents themselves have higher education levels.13

3. Education studied in other research areas in economics

Education has also increasingly come to feature prominently in other areas of economics. Some examples of this are: the impact of human capital in cross-country growth regressions;14 the importance of education/skill in explaining shifts in labour market inequality;15 the focus on education in development economics;16 empirical public finance, especially issues to do with financial resources devoted to schools;17 and, as already noted, the large and rapidly growing literature on intergenerational mobility.18

4. Methodological issues

Methodological issues are also highly pertinent to the upsurge of empirical research activity in the economics of education. Many of the methodological innovations made by empirical economists in recent times lend themselves well to questions to do with education acquisition and education impact. I list specifics below, but education policies and practice are amenable to evaluations using these techniques. This, coupled with new and rich data being available, seems likely to have resulted in the sorting of empirical economists to the education area.

There are many such innovations in technique, including: programme evaluation methods; randomised controlled trials; 'quasi-experiments' and difference-in-difference modelling; instrumental variables and causality; field experiments; and regression discontinuity approaches. The precise details of these are beyond the remit of this paper and do not need to be discussed here, but coupled with other complementary developments, it seems reasonable to say that these have been factors that have helped to facilitate the big upsurge in research.

10For example, Clark and Royer (2013).

'For example, Lochner and Moretti (2004) and Machin, Marie and Vujic (2011). 12See Lochner (2011). l3See the reviews of the intergenerational mobility literature in Black and Devereux (2010) and

Bjorklund and Salvanes (2011 ). 14For example, Barro (1991) and Krueger and Lindahl (2001). 15For example, Katz and Murphy (1992), Berman, Bound and Machin (1998) and Machin and Van

Reenen (1998). l6For example, Duflo (2001) and Miguel and Kremer (2004). "Hanushek, 1986 and 2003. 18See Solon (1999).

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Economies of education research and education policy 11

Many of these developments are relatively recent, even if there are related precursors to them from the past. It is clear that the influx of new data (which is discussed as the next explanation) and a range of quasi- or 'natural' experiments (such as raising the compulsory school-leaving age or class size rules) lend themselves well to implementation of these kinds of empirical methods. It has therefore not come as a great surprise (at least with the benefit of hindsight) to see that many of the applications of these 'modern' techniques are commonplace in the economics of education field and have played a role in the recent expansion of the research area.

5. More and better-quality data

There have been some significant developments in data provision and quality and these have almost certainly aided and promoted research in the economics of education. One extremely important advance has been the use of register data in the Scandinavian countries.19 Some of the key recent papers in the economics of education have used these data.20

More generally, administrative data from government departments have become available in other countries. A lot of recent research in the UK, for example, has been able to draw upon very rich census data on children in English schools.21

A third data source that has contributed to the upsurge of new economics of education research is the range of international test score data on children, including the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). These data have been used in many single-country studies and also in creative cross-country comparative research.22

Fourth, better-quality survey data are now available. Many household surveys contain much more detailed education data than in the past and these data have been used in a range of areas within the economics of education research field.23

'See Roed and Raaum (2003) for an in-depth discussion of the nature of these data and some of their uses.

20, Some examples are: Black, Devereux and Salvanes (2005a and 2005b) for Norway; Meghir and

Palme (2005) and Bjorklund, Lindahl and Plug (2006) for Sweden; and the cross-country comparisons paper by Bratsberg et al. (2007) that draws on register data from Denmark, Finland and Norway.

2lSee, among others, the discussion of research in Machin and Vignoles (2005).

22See the research review of this large and growing body of work in Hanushek and Woessmann (2011). 23See, for example, the estimates of employment shares and wage differentials from the General

Household Survey and the Labour Force Survey described in Table 2 above.

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12 Fiscal Studies

IV. Connections between research and education policy

The previous section suggested some reasons as to why there has been an increase in the prominence and research depth of the economics of education in the economics profession. It is also the case that many governments want (or say they want) more evidence-based policy (often, they say, as a pose to advocacy). This has become particularly true in terms of education policy. There is work that has been driven by policy (often in the form of ex-post evaluations) and there has been policy formation that has been driven by research. I will consider examples of both of these below.

It therefore seems natural to consider whether connections between the

economics of education research and education policy have helped improve the evidence base that is available to policymakers. It is evident that policy initiatives in education are everywhere, and there is often a demand for economic evaluations of these policies. Indeed, economists now seem to play more of a role (the education policy domain in many countries was often the sole home of educationalists in the past). Part of this has probably also emerged from what might be referred to as an 'evaluation culture' that has seeped into policymaking, for better or worse, and this is very well suited to the modern research methods used by economists that were discussed above.

The evolution of education policy in England provides a nice setting for discussion of these issues. This is because there have a been a lot of policy initiatives linked to key questions in the economics of education, beginning with the move to the so-called 'quasi-market' that began after the 1988 Education Act.24 Since then, there have been a range of moves to try to design education policy to enhance efficiency. Central examples include: league tables; teacher incentives; school choice and competition; public private partnerships; school governance; and school autonomy. All of these are areas where economists possess skills to look at the issues in a robust manner, and there is now a body of research work on these (and other policy-relevant) issues, often facilitated by the invaluable research resource offered by the very rich administrative data that have been collected on English schoolchildren since the mid-1990s.

To focus the discussion of the interface between economics of education

research and education policy, the rest of this section looks at three different areas of English education policy where, in my view, research has had an impact - or potentially will have an impact - upon the policy process. These are school autonomy, social mobility and 'experiments' in education.

' Glennerster, 1991; Le Grand and Bartlett, 1993.

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Economies of education research and education policy 13

1. School autonomy

A current 'hot' area of education research and policy in England is whether different school types - especially those where supposedly better autonomy and governance operate - can produce better outcomes for the pupils who attend them. The English academies programme has a high profile in the current debate.25

The debate on school autonomy has proven to be a controversial one. It has been informed by research debates on charter schools in the US,26 by the decentralisation of schooling and the setting-up of free schools in Sweden27 and by (somewhat contested) work on the English academy schools.28 In the broader setting, the OECD's PISA data have been used to show that autonomy improvements have scope to deliver better outcomes for pupils, but not everywhere: autonomy must go hand in hand with good accountability to generate positive effects.29

However, one can see warning signs on the use of research in some settings. The use of evidence on academies offers a case in point. The Machin and Vernoit (2011) research on the academies that were introduced by the Labour government between school years 2002-03 and 2008-09 reported two key findings: first, that the quality of pupil intake relative to predecessor schools improved; and second, that there were significant, but modest in magnitude, improvements in pupil performance. Additionally, there was quite a lot of heterogeneity across schools in the nature of the estimated effects. These findings have been used in a clear and useful manner to shed light on the important question about whether academy conversions can produce beneficial outcomes.

However, the findings from this (very particular) piece of research have been quite commonly extrapolated to the new academies introduced by the coalition government (those set up after the May 2010 Academies Act). This is potentially misleading, in several directions. For example, the new post May-2010 academies are actually very different from their predecessors, and the recent policy of mass academisation is a very different kettle of fish in many regards.30 On the former, many new academy conversion schools were better performers than average in their pre-academy form (i.e. the opposite of the Labour academies, which were much worse performers than the average prior to conversion). On the latter, the policy scale is much larger and the details are really quite different. Many schools are converters only (and not sponsored), some academies are run by chains, and the policy no

See Eyles and Machin (2014). 26See Betts and Hill (2010). "See Bjorklund et al. (2005). 28See National Audit Office (2010) and Machin and Vernoit (2011 ). 29See OECD (2011). 30See National Audit Office (2012).

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14 Fiscal Studies

longer applies just to secondary schools as primary schools are also being awarded academy status. It is clearly too early in the day to evaluate the coalition academies in the same way as research has looked at the Labour academies.

2. Social mobility

A high-profile example - quite possibly the highest-profile example in the education field - of research influencing policy discussions is the finding (from studying data from two large cohort studies) that intergenerational mobility in economic status has fallen over time. The initial paper reporting this was by Blanden, Goodman, Gregg and Machin in 2002 and the work was highly popularised in a Sutton Trust report by Blanden, Gregg and Machin in 2005.31 The findings of the paper have been, and continue to be, widely cited. Falls in social mobility have been regularly referred to in the media, policy circles and academia. The work was a core finding for the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission headed by Alan Milburn, and all political parties committed to 'improving' mobility.

This work certainly was used in the making of education policy around social mobility. Of course, it has been criticised and used out of context as well. Writing in Prospect in 2008, David Goodhart remarked that

This slender analysis has, arguably, had more influence on public debate than any academic paper of the past 20 years. Every commentator and politician who 'knows' that mobility has fallen off a cliff in recent years is almost certainly basing his or her assumption on the Sutton Trust report. Yet it is a highly controversial and contested piece of work.

One can debate whether social mobility forms a policy focus in and of itself. I would prefer to think of policy aimed at the drivers of social mobility - education being one of them - and, irrespective of views expressed about the research, it seems undeniable that the debates on policy surrounding social mobility have been affected by this and other subsequent research in the area.

3. Experiments in English education

The third, and last, area on which I focus is an area of growing influence in education policy to which the skills of economists are highly complementary. Part of the quest for evidence-based education policy has been premised on undertaking good evaluations based on credible research designs. The research by economists and other quantitative researchers in the education field has pushed the bar higher in this area.

"The published version of the initial paper is Blanden et al. (2005).

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Economies of education research and education policy 15

The skills of economists in using well-defined programme evaluation methods have led to more involvement in producing evidence that is relevant to education policy and its design and implementation. Respectively looking backwards and forwards in time, there are at least two important strands to this:

Some high-quality quasi-experimental and ex-post policy evaluations of policies have been undertaken. Examples in the English context include work on the literacy hour32 and on the education maintenance allowance.33

It has been recognised that evaluations can be done better by having evaluators involved from the outset. The Education Endowment

Foundation, where teams of economists and other quantitative educationalists and social scientists are involved in running and evaluating randomised controlled trials on education policies, is aiming to do this. The notion is clearly a highly desirable aspect that, if successful, will also more closely tie education research to the making of education policy.

V. Conclusion

There is by now a large (and rapidly growing) body of research by economists on education. It is very empirical, grounded in first-order economic principles, and directly relevant to policy. Evidence on a range of questions to do with education throughout the life cycle has increasingly been produced with coherent and robust research designs, and (sometimes) its direct relevance for policy has significantly strengthened the field.

At the same time, and as a consequence (at least in part) of the increased and higher-quality research volume, economists have become more involved in education policy, evaluation and policy advice. This trend seems highly likely to continue into the future as the economics of education remains a popular and growing field amongst graduate students and junior academics.

Machin and McNally, 2008. l3Dearden et al., 2009.

References

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Contents

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Issue Table of Contents

Fiscal Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1 (March 2014) pp. 1-116

Front Matter
The IFS Annual Lecture

Economics of Education Research and Its Role in the Making of Education Policy [pp. 1-18]
Free Immigration and Welfare Access: The Swedish Experience [pp. 19-39]
Response of Tax Credit Claims to Tax Enforcement: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment in Chile [pp. 41-65]
A Wealth Tax on the Rich to Bring Down Public Debt? Revenue and Distributional Effects of a Capital Levy in Germany [pp. 67-89]
The Determinants of the Volatility of Fiscal Policy Discretion [pp. 91-115]

Back Matter