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We consider the influence that mobile pupils have on the academic achievements of other pupils in English primary schools. We find that immobile pupils in year-groups (à la US “grades”) that experience high pupil entry rates progress less well academically between ages 8 and 11 than pupils in low-mobility year groups (grades), even within the same school. The disruptive externalities of mobility are statistically significant, but actually very small in terms of their educational impact. An increase in annual entry rates from 0 to 10% (a 4 standard deviation change) would set the average incumbent pupil back by between 1 and 2 weeks, or about 4% of one standard deviation of the gain in pupil achievement between ages 7 and 11.

We explore the association between urban density and pupil attainment using three cohorts of pupils in schooling in England. Although – as widely recognised – attainment in dense urban places is low on average, this is not because urban environments disadvantage pupils, but because the most disadvantaged pupils with low average attainments attend the most urbanised schools. To control for this, we exploit changes in urban density faced by pupils during compulsory transition from Primary to Secondary school, and measure educational progress at the end of the Secondary phase, relative to attainments at the end of Primary schooling. Our results suggest that there are small but significant benefits from education in schools in more densely urbanised settings: Pupils in schools in relatively dense places – measured in terms of school density and other urban indicators – progress faster than others in their cohort, but the elasticity is low, at around 0.02. We detect this density advantage even amongst pupils moving relatively short distances between Primary and Secondary schools within urban areas, so we cannot attribute it to broad urbanisation effects experienced by pupils making rural-urban school moves. A more likely explanation lies in greater school choice and competition between closely co-located educational providers.

It is a common belief that children will thrive if educated amongst better class and schoolmates. It is a belief that guides many parents in their choice of school, and has important implications for policy on school choice and organisation. Many studies have tried to measure this ‘peer-group’ effect, but the enterprise is plagued by conceptual and empirical difficulties. In this study, we use the population of state Secondary school pupils in England to tease out how pupil attainments at age 14 respond to differences in the prior, age-11 attainments of their current school grade peer-group. Data on home addresses and school attendance allow us to compare outcomes of children who live in the same street, or who attended the same Primary school up to age 11, but then move on to different Secondary schools with different peer-group quality. These ‘peer-group’ effects seem to exist, but they are small in magnitude – a 1 s.d. increase in peer-group prior attainments allows a pupil to improve their own score by barely 0.08 of a standard deviation. We tackle various gnarly empirical problems arising in regression models of pupil attainments that incorporate individual and group prior attainments as explanatory variables. Estimates from such models are seriously biased by transient components in prior pupil attainments, correlation between current and prior peer-group characteristics and by ability sorting into Secondary schooling. We address these issues by using teachers predictions as instruments for prior attainments, defining a pupil’s current peer-group in terms of those school mates with whom he or she has had no contact in the past, and by predicting current peer-group attainments with the productivity of their origin Primary schools, measured by the gain in attainments of different cohorts between ages 7 and 11.

An exploration of whether childhood poverty makes adult poverty more likely, and how such patterns may have changed over time. The recent focus on reducing the extent of child poverty in the UK stems mainly from worries about the future consequences of poverty on children’s later achievement. With this background in mind, it is clearly crucial to improve our understanding of the costs of growing up poor. This report explores the strength of the link between childhood poverty and poverty later in life, and asks whether this link has grown stronger or weaker in recent decades. Using information on the incomes of two British cohorts who were teenagers either in the 1970s or in the 1980s, it asks: How large is the transmission of poverty between a teenager’s parents’ circumstances and their own circumstances when they are in their early 30s? By how much has the strength of this transmission of poverty changed between the two cohorts studied? How far do the effects of early disadvantage continue to be felt as individuals reach middle age?

In this paper we implement a powerful empirical approach than has not previously been applied to rail transport evaluation to ascertain how much consumers value rail access. We study the effects on house prices of a transport innovation that altered the distance to the nearest station for some households, but left others unaffected. The transport innovation we study is the construction of new stations under improvements made to the London Underground and Docklands Light Railway in South East London in the late 1990s. Using the innovation to implement a quasi-experimental approach studying house price changes in affected versus unaffected areas allows us to avoid the biases inherent in cross-sectional valuation work. Our evidence on distance-station effects on prices suggests that rail access is significantly valued by households and that these valuations are sizable as compared to the valuations of other local amenities and services.

This paper estimates the impact of recorded domestic property crime on property prices in the London area. Crimes in the Criminal Damage category have a significant negative impact on prices. Burglaries have no measurable impact on prices, even after allowing for the potential dependence of burglary rates on unobserved property characteristics. A one-tenth standard deviation decrease in the local density of criminal damage adds 1 per cent to the price of an average Inner London property. One explanation we offer here is that vandalism, graffiti and other forms of criminal damage motivate fear of crime in the community and may be taken as signals or symptoms of community instability and neighbourhood deterioration in general.