The projects within this theme will strengthen our understanding of the effects of competitions, changes in market structure and incentives on performance. These issues have been extensively researched in a private sector context, but this set of projects will create new evidence for public services. Much of the empirical research exploits opportunities created by specific government interventions to aid identification of cause and effect. Importantly, this also means that the findings will be of direct relevance for policy.
The impact of mergers on competition and performance in the private sector has been the subject of much research. This project examines the effect of mergers on NHS productivity using data on a panel of hospitals. To identify the impact of mergers on performance empirically, our data exploit mergers that were not permitted to go ahead (for non-performance-related reasons) as a counterfactual group.
This project examines the medium-term impact of the opening of an Academy school, one of which is located in south Bristol, using a series of pupil-level census, supplemented by other neighbourhood data. Using a difference-in-difference design, this project will allow us to examine a number of outcomes, such as levels of attainment in schools, the distribution of attainment, the attainment of children low ability and those from disadvantages families, school composition and the degree of sorting.
Universities play an important role as certifiers: grades and degree classes are supposed to provide a good estimate of a student’s ability. This information is clearly very useful to employers. We aim to understand how competition (for students and/or funding) and other types of incentive schemes affect the certification role of universities. Our focus is primarily theoretical, although we do not exclude using empirical evidence to collaborate our findings.
Over the recent past, the Welsh Assembly Government has moved away from ‘marketisation’ in education: less testing and no published league tables. The project uses policy change to contract outcomes such as pupil performance and sorting across schools, with the same outcomes in England where these policies have remained. We will compare outcomes in Wales and England using a difference-in-difference research design on pupil-level data.
School league tables have been published in England since 1992. But who actually uses them? Do they provide the information required by the various stakeholders? Given who uses them, and how, are they ‘fit for purpose’? If not, how may they be improved? This project uses interviews with key stakeholders – parents, head teachers, governors, Las, Ofsted, DCSF – to address these questions.
In 1999 devolution gave the four countries of the UK independent power over health policy. Divergence in policy between England and Scotland provides the opportunity to use Scotland as a control in assessing the impact of the English target and then market regime on health care outputs. We will identify precise differences in policy stance between the two countries, and will exploit large-scale datasets on health and hospital production to establish whether the policies had an impact.
The aim of the research is to examine whether and how competition, introduced through PbR, is affecting patient care and to draw out the implications for the economic regulation of the health care market. We aim to produce research which is both policy relevant and accessible to policy makers and to produce research meeting the criteria of academic excellence.
This research aims to help answer important questions facing individuals and the Government, questions such as:
By looking at the introduction of the Government's policy permitting children in England to commence their education at age 3, it is possible to estimate the effect that early education has on reading, writing and maths results at age seven.
A further element of the research involves estimating the causal effect of education on wages by exploiting differences in education levels resulting from the raising of the school leaving age and also differences due to time preferences of individuals which are arguably unrelated to their ability. The return to education is of great importance in light of the plan to raise the school leaving age to 18.
This research also studies the value of employment in the public and private sectors, not just in terms of earnings levels, but also their range and growth, as well as job security, using a complex statistical model to account for unobserved differences between individuals.
