Tiernan Evans

Thanks Henry!

10/10 Thanks for reading! The full paper is on my website, and I welcome any feedback and comments!
🔗 www.tiernanevans.com

9/ I’ve focused on academic qualifications in this paper, but England also has a robust vocational education system. There are reasons responses on these margins might be different and there’s loads more I’m excited to look into!

8/ 🎯 If jobs are moved to an area without existing surplus of the desired skill mix, workers will need to come from elsewhere, or jobs will be filled with a mismatched skill mix. Further, moving jobs alone is not sufficient to reduce disparities in educational attainment across space.

7/ 🗺️ This has important implications for the education impact of policies like Places for Growth and Levelling Up which are designed to geographically spread job opportunities, as well as for place-based industrial policy like the CHIPS and Science Act.

6/ Schooling cohorts are small compared to the stock of workers; these magnitudes (if stable past the medium-run) imply the increased demand for workers with these skills will not be met by local students.

5/ At the Travel to Work Area (~ commuting zone), I find no evidence that students’ ed choices change in response!
Within a Postcode Group (~zip code), I can bound the estimates from above at an 0.5pp increase in students studying a field at uni for every 1pp increase in demand for that field.

4/ I document a positive cross-sectional correlation between the level and field of skills demanded in local jobs and education choices.

❗ But, using a dynamic DID strategy, I find a muted response to large increases in local demand among local students.

3/ Why England?
1. School funding doesn’t depend on local property taxes, so education supply doesn’t change when local jobs do.
2. Great data! I observe the universe of students at state-funded (i.e. public) schools and the near universe of establishments.

2/ 🔍❓How do students' education choices respond to changes in local skill demand?
I use admin data on businesses and students in England to understand this relationship and leverage large local changes to evaluate the dynamics of students’ response.

Local Labour Markets and Skill Acquisition - Tiernan Evans Abstract: Regional inequalities in developed economies have been the subject of both a large academic literature and policy interest. Yet, little is known about the causal impact of local skill demand on the supply of skills by local students. I study this relationship in England, which has large spatial disparities; an educational system where local economic conditions have little direct impact on school funding; standardized test scores; and detailed data on outcomes by field. I use establishment-level administrative data to document the cross-sectional and panel variation in the level and field of skills demanded. I then combine this with individual-level education data to study whether local skill demand shapes local students’ educational attainment: their results; level of education; and fields of study. I document a positive cross-sectional correlation between the skills demanded in local jobs and education choices. But, using a dynamic difference-in-difference strategy, I find at most a very muted response to large increases in local demand for degrees or specific skills for subsequent cohorts of students making educational investment decisions. I discuss the implications of my findings for policies aiming to target regional inequality.

Hello #EconSky! I’m Tiernan, a Labo(u)r #JMC from LSE. My research focuses on education choices, spatial inequality, and geographic mobility.
🌐 Website: www.tiernanevans.com
🧵 on my #EconJMP 👇 (1/10)

Thanks!

PhD student on the market this year! My JMP (thread coming soonish) looks at how students' education choices are shaped by the skills required in the local labour market in which they grow up

This also looks quite useful for cases where you want other alternative (e.g. shorter) labels for export/ display