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Reader in Economics, University of Surrey
Dr Jo Blanden joined the Department of Economics at Surrey in October 2005, and is also a visiting fellow at LSE. She graduated from the University of East Anglia in 1998; she then studied for a Masters degree in Economics at University College London. From 2000 to 2005 she was a full-time researcher in the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) at the London School of Economics and completed her PhD at UCL over this time.
Jo’s research interests are primarily in labour, family and education economics.
Her work with Paul Gregg and Steve Machin on ‘Changes in Intergenerational Mobility in Britain’ found that the relationship between family income and children’s adult earnings has strengthened for those born in 1970 compared to those born in 1958. Recent work with Lindsey Macmillan seeks to understand how social mobility is affected by educational expansion.
Jo also works on the evaluation of education and health policies in the UK. In education she has a research grant to look at the impact of universal part-time nursery provision on children’s later educational outcomes (with Sandra McNally and Kirstine Hansen) which is now part of a larger collaboration with Birgitta Rabe and Emilia Del Bono. This work indicates that the £2 billion invested each year in part-time early education appears to have quite small educational benefits. She is also working to understand the impressive improvement in the performance of London Schools. In 2016, Jo become principal investigator on the five-year programme of work ‘Delivering Better for Less’, which seeks to understand how public sector productivity can be measured, with a particular focus on the National Health Service.