There is a very interesting report out from the Social Market Foundation that investigates the characteristics parents value in a school. The core result is that less-wealthy families do not choose schools on the basis of academic achievement: This leads the SMF to express concern that school choice may not lift educational achievement because some parents […]
In December last year The Work Foundation released a comprehensive review of performance-related pay in the public sector: PRP schemes can be effective in improving outcomes across the three public services for which evidence is available (health, education and the civil service), although the central conclusion is that the outcomes from PRP are mixed, which […]
Earlier this year Raj Chetty gave the keynote address at the annual AEA meeting. He discussed the role of behavioural economics for public policy, giving examples of successful nudges such as a change in defaults for retirement saving. Unusually, he took the goal of policy as given and spent his lecture talking about how behavioural […]
Alberto Alesina has returned to the fray with a new paper that shows how tax rises are far more damaging than tax cuts. With a new dataset covering the recessionary years, this is the most up-to-date evidence on fiscal consolidation available. Importantly, they are unable to discern evidence that the ZLB caused the effects of […]
In a bizarre leader article The Economist praises microeconomists for their use of data to better predict people’s behaviour and recommend macroeconomists do the same: Macroeconomists are puritans, creating theoretical models before testing them against data. The new breed [of microeconomists] ignore the whiteboard, chucking numbers together and letting computers spot the patterns. And macroeconomists […]