Stephen Machin

Additionally, Machin has served as director of the Centre for the Economics of Education at LSE (1999–2009) and held visiting appointments at Harvard University (1993–94) and at MIT (2001–02).

[9][10] The rise in wage inequality in the United Kingdom from the late 1970s prompted Machin to research the subject, along with developments in intergenerational mobility.

[13] Related to his work on the role of wage-education differentials, Machin has also conducted research on skill-biased technological change.

With Stephen Gibbons, he finds that a 10pp increase in a British neighbourhood in the share of children reaching the grade corresponding to their age increases the neighbourhood's property prices by 6.7%, implying that society values improved primary school performance by up to GBP 90 per year and per child at 2000 property prices.

[20] Exploiting changes in compulsory schooling laws in the UK through a regression discontinuity design, Machin, Olivier Marie and Suncica Vujic find that education can substantially reduce (property) crime rates.

[24] Finally, Machin and Gibbons pioneered a new approach to estimating consumers' valuation of rail access through housing prices, finding that local households significantly valued the construction of new stations in the context of improvements to the London Underground and Docklands Light Railway in South East London in the late 1990s.