Galindo-Rueda, Fernando, and Anna Vignoles. 2005. "The Declining Relative Importance of Ability in Predicting Educational Attainment." Journal of Human Resources 40(2): 335-353.

Most countries seek to reduce inequality by encouraging educational attainment, particularly by striving for better outcomes for able individuals from poor backgrounds. We analyse whether this has been a feature of Britain's substantial expansion of education during the past several decades. We use two unique longitudinal studies to test whether these improvements have been associated with changes in the role of cognitive ability and parental background in determining educational achievement. We find a decline in the importance of ability in explaining educational performance, in part because low ability children with high economic status experienced the largest increases in educational attainment.

Fernando Galindo-Rueda is a professor of economics at the Centre for the Economics of Education, Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics and IZA. Anna Vignoles is a professor of economics at the Institute of Education and Centre for the Economics of Education, Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics. Funding from the Treasury's Evidence Based Policy Fund and the European Community Framework 5 EDWIN (Education and Wage Inequality in Europe) grant is gratefully acknowledged. We would also like to thank Simon Burgess, David Burbridge, Jonathan Haskel, Ramesh Kapadia, Steve Machin, Alan Manning, and participants at the CEPR conference on the Economics of Education and Inequality 2003 and seminars at LSE, New York, University of York, Oxford and Royal Economic Society Conference in Swansea. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning October 2005 through September 2008 from Fernando Galindo-Rueda, Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, Houghton St, London, WC2A 2AE. United Kingdom, <f.galindo-rueda@lse.ac.uk> Telephone: ++44(0)2079556646.