Yesterday the government announced “details of two ambitious schemes that will unlock the aspirations of a new generation of home buyers, and get Britain building thousands of new homes.” Wow! A scheme that will allow more people to benefit from the spoils of ever increasing gains in the housing market, even where they would ordinarily …
Public Policy
Football tournaments, educational attainment and inequality
How can you improve GCSE results at a stroke, particularly for low ability males from disadvantaged backgrounds? Shift the UEFA European Championships and FIFA World Cup to August, according to recent research by the University of Bristol. That research found that in years where there was a major football tournament which coincided with the GCSE exam …
Who’s counting?
As a patron of both (perhaps too regular a patron), I know that Starbucks and McDonalds have both recently introduced calorie information to their menus in the UK as part of the government’s Public Health Responsibility Deal. New York passed legislation in 2009 that requires restaurants with more than 15 outlets to print such information on …
Thoughts on the public sector strike
I’ll declare my interest up-front: a few weeks ago I became a civil servant and have already started contributing towards my public sector pension. However, I’m not a member of a union so can’t take part in the strikes today. The defined benefit pension available to me is a career average scheme (long gone are …
Student loans: is debt aversion really that important?
There are several research papers which suggest that debt aversion is a material factor for young people when deciding whether or not to go to university (some even advocate calling student loans something else to increase take-up). Debt aversion is regularly cited in opposition of changes to higher education funding which shift the balance of …
Out of credit
Are lending institutions solely responsible for individuals getting into debt they struggle to, or cannot, repay? I ask because the campaign to ‘End Legal Loan Sharking‘ – organised by Compass and supported in Parliament by, amongst others, Stella Creasy MP – seems to lay the blame primarily, if not wholly, at their door; borrowers themselves …