I am Professor of Economic and Social Policy at the Institute for Policy Research, where I lead the programme of research on widening participation in higher education. Recent projects have examined the earnings returns to undergraduate and post-graduate degrees, the role of further education in progression to higher education and the impact of early health on later educational and labour market outcomes. I also continue to research the returns to education more broadly having published a number of papers examining the causal effects of education on earnings, employment, health, and the education of the next generation.

I have been at the University of Bath since 2012, first as a Prize (Research) Fellow and then a lecturer before moving into the IPR as Reader in Public Policy in 2017. Prior to joining Bath I held positions at University College Dublin and the University of Bristol. I attained my PhD in Economics from the University of Warwick in 2009. 

My research primarily uses microeconometric techniques applied to large-scale survey and administrative datasets to address research questions related to the economics of education - particularly higher education. Currently my main research projects use the Dept. for Education's Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) dataset - which links National Pupil Database, Higher Education Statistics Agency and HMRC data. In other recent or ongoing projects I have used the New Earnings Survey Panel Dataset, the Quarterly Labour Force Survey, UKHLS, BHPS, the ALSPAC cohort data and the UK BioBank. 

I am a Research Fellow at the IZA (Institute of Labor Economics). My full CV can be downloaded here: https://www.iza.org/wc/cvs/cv_Dickson.pdf

I am currently on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Education and Work and from 2018-2023 I served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Social Policy. 

I am interested in supervising PhD students from economics/advanced quantitative methods backgrounds who are investigating topics in the economics of education, in particular:

• Widening participation in higher education
• Returns to education
• Social mobility