Lorraine Dearden

Since early 1995, Dearden has been affiliated with the Institute for Fiscal Studies, whose education sector she directs and where she currently works as research fellow. Moreover, since 2005, she has been the Professor of Economics and Social Statistics at UCL's Institute of Education and the deputy director of the Centre for the Economics of Education (CEE) at LSE. Between 2008 and 2011, Dearden has also worked as director of the ADMIN Node of the Economic and Social Research Council's National Centre for Research Methods. Moreover, she is also affiliated with the IZA Institute of Labor Economics and the Academy of Social Sciences.

Lorraine Dearden grew up in Australia, where she attended high school and college in Canberra. After earning bachelor's degrees in economics and law from the Australian National University in 1983 and 1986, respectively, she worked for the Australian Department of Employment, Education and Training on economic policy until 1992, earning a M.Sc. in economics from the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1990-91. She then pursued a PhD in economics at the University College London (UCL), graduating in 1995 with a dissertation on "Education, Training and Earnings in Australia and Britain".

Dearden has conducted extensive research on the determinants and returns to education along with Richard Blundell, Costas Meghir, Barbara Sianesi, Alissa Goodman, Howard Reed, and Anna Vignoles. Together with Blundell and Meghir, she finds that, in Britain in the 1980s, both the highly educated and men were substantially more susceptible to receive employer-provided training and work-related training than women, with training increasing workers' real earnings by 5% and up to 10% in case of graduation over 10 years and the returns to training persisting through changes in employers. Reviewing the evidence on the returns to education and training prior to the mid-2000s, they - along with Sianesi - conclude that "there is a substantial body of evidence on the contribution of education to economic growth" (as opposed to e.g. Lant Pritchett). In further work, Dearden, Blundell, Goodman and Reed estimate that, controlling for individual characteristics, an undergraduate degree raised the earnings of British men and women from the 1958 cohort by, on average, 17% and 37%, respectively, with lower returns for higher degrees and non-degree higher education. Together with Vignoles, Steven McIntosh and Michal Myck, Dearden further finds that the wage premia for vocational qualifications in the UK in the 1990s were generally lower than those of academic qualifications. Moreover, Dearden, Meghir and Javier Ferri find that the puil-teacher ratio in the UK has generally no impact on educational qualifications or on men's wages but on those of low-ability women and that attending selective schools improves educational outcomes and, for men, also wages. Finally, Dearden, Blundell and Sianesi estimate that, compared to dropping out of secondary school at age 16, O-levels raise earnings by 18%, A-levels by 24% and higher education by 48%.

Lorraine Margaret Dearden (born October 1, 1961) is an Australo-British economist and professor of economics and social statistics at the Department of Social Science of the Institute of Education, University College London. Her research focuses on the economics of education.