When you are born matters: the impact of date of birth on educational outcomes in England

Claire Crawford (), Lorraine Dearden () and Costas Meghir
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Claire Crawford: Institute for Fiscal Studies, 7 Ridgmount Street, London, WC1E 7AE; Institute of Education, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL, UK.

No 10-09, DoQSS Working Papers from Quantitative Social Science - UCL Social Research Institute, University College London

Abstract: Accurate estimates of the extent of ethnic parity amongst benefit claimants are very important for policymakers who provide interventions for these groups. We use new administrative data on benefit claimants in Great Britain to document differences in labour market outcomes between Ethnic Minority and White claimants, both before and after controlling for rich observable characteristics. We do so using a variety of methods, from OLS to propensity score matching to difference-in-differences. We find that, in many cases, Minorities and Whites are simply too different for satisfactory estimates to be calculated, and that results are sensitive to the methodology used. This calls into question previous results based on simple regression techniques, which may hide the fact that observationally different ethnic groups are being compared by parametric extrapolation. For Income Support and Incapacity Benefit claimants, however, we could calculate satisfactory results. For these groups, large and significant raw penalties almost always disappear once we appropriately control for pre-inflow characteristics.

Keywords: higher education; widening participation; socio-economic disadvantage; administrative data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2010-06-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (75)

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Working Paper: When you are born matters: the impact of date of birth on educational outcomes in England (2010)
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