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publications
The Role of Earnings, Financial, and other Factors in University Attendance
(2023)
Why do some people choose to attend university, and enjoy state-subsidised benefits, while others do not? We shed new light on this key issue by comparing and quantifying the roles of earnings and non-pecuniary factors in the educational de- cisions of young people in the UK, exploiting information on young people’s beliefs about the advantages and disadvantages of university. We also investigate changes in these factors over time, and their implications for social mobility. We specify a model of educational choice, explicitly including expectations about earnings, financial, and non-pecuniary factors. Our estimation strategy exploits panel survey data on young people’s expectations about key outcomes both at, and after, university, linked to their realised outcomes. Income maximisation, despite its prevalent role in the literature, is only part of the story: other factors are at least as important as earnings in determining whether someone goes to university. Non-pecuniary factors also play an important role both the SES-gap in educational attainment, and the huge growth in degree attainment between the 1980s and 2010s. Abstract
Private highs: Investigating university overmatch among students from elite schools
CEPEO Working Paper Series (2025)
Inequality in elite college attendance is a key driver of intergenerational mobility. This paper shifts the focus upstream to examine how elite high school attendance-specifically, enrollment in UK private, fee-paying schools-shapes university destinations across the academic ability distribution. Using linked administrative data, we show that the main advantage conferred by private schools is not that their highachieving students are more likely to access elite degree courses, but rather that their lower-achieving students are more likely to overmatch by attending more selective degree courses than might be expected given their grades. In particular, we show that lower attaining pupils from fee-paying high schools enrol in university courses around 15 percentiles higher ranked than similarly qualified state school students. The greater propensity of private school students to overmatch is driven largely by differences in application behavior, with even the weakest private school students aiming higher than their higher achieving state school peers. Abstract
Estimating heterogeneous returns to college by cognitive and non-cognitive ability
CEPEO Working Paper Series (2025)
Recent work has highlighted the significant variation in returns to higher education across individuals. I develop a novel methodology --- exploiting recent advances in the identification of mixture models --- which groups individuals according to their prior ability and estimates the wage returns to a university degree by group, and show that the model is non-parametrically identified. Applying the method to data from a UK cohort study, the findings reflect recent evidence that skills and ability are multidimensional. The flexible model allows the returns to university to vary across the (multi-dimensional) ability distribution, a flexibility missing from commonly used additive models, but which I show is empirically important. Returns are generally increasing in ability for both men and women, but vary non-monotonically across the ability distribution. Abstract
talks
L’impact de la formation professionnelle en France: une première exploration sur les données Défis du Céreq
Published:
Nous présentons ici une première exploration économétrique de l’enquête Defis du Céreq, réalisée sur la base des données mises à notre disposition à l’automne 2017 et dans l’année 2018. L’enquête Defis a été construite pour, notamment, évaluer les effets de la formation professionnelle sur les carrières des travailleurs. Elle s’ appuie sur un échantillon initial d’entreprises, dans lequel on a tiré un échantillon d’individus, et dont on suit ensuite les parcours sur le marché du travail, à travers des séquences d’emploi et de formation. L’enquête Defis est un panel en cours de constitution. Une particularité notable de ces données est l’appariement avec les déclarations annuelles de données sociales (DADS) de l’INSEE. Ces DADS permettent, en particulier, de disposer d’observations fiables des salaires des individus. Sur la question de la formation professionnelle (ou training), il existe une importante littérature internationale en économie du travail et en économétrie appliquée, que nous passerons ici en revue de manière sommaire. Il existe en français un bon texte de synthèse sur ce sujet, dû à Marc Ferraci (2013). D’importantes revues de littérature sont dues à Heckman, Lalonde & Smith (1999) d’une part et McCall, Smith & Wunsch (2016), d’autre part. On pourra aussi se reporter aux méta-analyses de Card, Kluve & Weber (2010, 2018) et Haelermans & Borghans (2012). Nous nous concentrons ici sur les contributions qui proposent une stratégie pour identifier un effet dit causal de la formation.
Recommended citation: Cassagneau-Francis, 0., R. Gary-Bobo, J. Pernaudet, J.-M. Robin (2020). "L’impact de la formation professionnelle en France: une première exploration sur les données Défis du Céreq." Céreq Échanges. 1(1).
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The merits of teacher assessment versus external exams to measure student achievement
Published:
There is little to no consensus in the academic literature over whether centralised, standardised exams are better for students than teacher assessments. While a growing body of evidence from economics highlights bias in teacher assessments, educationalists and psychologists point to the harm caused by high-stakes exam-related stress and argue that exams and teacher assessments generally agree very closely. This lack of academic consensus is reflected in policy: a wide variety of assessment methods are used across (and even within) countries. Policymakers should be aware of the potential for inequalities in non-blind assessments and consider carefully the consequences of relying on a single method of assessment. Abstract
The potential effects of the cost of living crisis on children’s outcomes
Published:
The ongoing energy crisis and surge in inflation is likely to push more and more families into poverty and could leave three million more Britons under the absolute poverty line (Resolution Foundation, 2022). Parents’ purchasing power is reduced by higher prices. This not only causes immediate financial difficulties which families must endure, it may also have long-lasting downstream effects on child development. These can even persist even into adulthood and affect educational and employment opportunities and outcomes. The effects of poverty do not solely impact poor families and their children: lower educational and adult outcomes reflect a lower level of productivity, and hence a lower level of economic growth. Therefore, it is in the interests of all of society to avoid the scarring effects of poverty and ensure prosperity and growth for future generations. This briefing note explores the impact the current cost of living crisis might have on children in poorer families. We first discuss some of the reasons why relatively permanent differences in income between families might affect children’s educational (and later) outcomes, and the specific difficulty (and possible solutions) in separating a causal impact from a correlation or association. We then present some of the key evidence from studies of temporary changes in income which suggests that there are important links between fluctuations in family income or purchasing power and children’s outcomes across the lifespan with consequences relevant for the current cost of living crisis.
Recommended citation: Cassagneau-Francis, O., D. Kelly (2022). "The potential effects of the cost of living crisis on children's outcomes" CEPEO Breifing Note Series. 17.
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teaching
Economics of education
Undergraduate course, UCL, 2025
Lecturer for 2nd-year UG course in economics of education.
Intro to Economics I
Undergraduate course, UCL, SRI, 2025
Seminar leader and guest lecturer