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We revisit the relationship between cognitive skills and wage inequality using data from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). We argue that previous research suffered from a number of methodological shortcomings, and we offer a single and unified analytical framework for assessing the contribution of skills (including demand and supply conditions) and labour market institutions to wage inequality. Contrary to most previous research, we find that skills are at least as important as labour market institutions in explaining higher wage inequality in the United States. ispartof: CES - Discussion paper series, DPS15.18 pages:1-32 status: published

In this paper, we use two new datasets to explore the extent to which the gender gap in higher education participation amongst young people in England is related to prior attainment. We find no conclusive evidence of a gender difference in the likelihood of participating in higher education once prior attainment is controlled for. We do find, however, that young people from ethnic minority backgrounds are overwhelmingly more likely to enter higher education compared to White people with the same prior attainment. In the case of young people who were eligible for free school meals, we find that prior attainment explains the vast majority of the gap in participation compared to non-FSM pupils, however we still find a small, negative (and statistically significant) effect, which we could not eliminate entirely in any of our models.

In this paper, we investigate the low degree attainment of ethnic minority students in higher education in England. Using a partial proportional odds model and data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency for qualifiers who started their course of study in 2002/03, we find that even after controlling for the majority of factors which we would expect to have an impact on attainment, being from a minority ethnic community is still statistically significant in explaining final attainment, although the gap has been significantly reduced.