Philip Oreopoulos is ranked among the top 2% of economists by IDEAS/RePEc. Most of his research relates to education, labour economics, urban economics, experimental economics, and the sociology of economics. A substantial part of Oreopoulos' research deals with the consequences of changes in compulsory schooling laws, especially in the United Kingdom, which provide an exogenous variation of education. In this context, among else, he found
that the benefits of compulsory schooling are very large - 10-15% higher annual earnings per additional year of high school - independent of whether they affect the majority or only a minority of those subject to it;
that adolescents drop out of school rather because they ignore or heavily discount future consequences of dropping out than because of an aversion against high school, which implies that making school compulsory or offering incentives for students to stay in school may help substantially improve lifetime outcomes;
that, in both the U.S. and the UK, educated people are generally more interested and involved in politics, but that - unlike in the UK - less educated US Americans are also less likely to vote than highly educated US Americans, with registration rules being the likely culprit by raising barriers for voting that may be excessively high for uneducated individuals ;
and that a 1-year increase in the education of either parent reduces the likelihood that a child repeats a grade by 2-4% in the U.S., thus reducing intergenerational social mobility.
Other findings of Oreopoulos include that workers who graduated from college during recessions suffer from persistently lower earnings for up to a decade, beginning their careers working for lower paying employers and then gradually upgrading their jobs by moving to better firms, with the speed of the upgrading determined by graduates' socioeconomic backgrounds ; that the non-financial benefits of schooling - e.g. higher work enjoyment, patience, trust, ambition, and risk aversion or also better decisions regarding health, marriage or parenting - are at least as large as the financial benefits of schooling and would - ironically - benefit school dropouts most ; that the quality of neighborhoods in which children grow up in has only a very small impact in determining their adult earnings, likelihood of unemployment, or dependence on welfare benefits, but that the quality of the children's family environment does; and that poor infant health predicts both mortality within one year, and mortality up to age 17, as well as long-term educational and labour force outcomes such as high school completion and welfare takeup. More recently and in line with his work at J-PAL, Philip Oreopoulos has used randomized controlled trials to investigate issues in education, e.g. finding that combining academic support services and financial incentives for good grades may be particularly effective in improving the grades and long-term study skills of female freshmen but will have no effect on men, in part because of poor male take-up, or that combining the offer of assistance with completing the college financial aid applications with information about aid estimates may be effective in substantially increasing the likelihood of college attendance, persistence and aid receipt for low-income individuals whereas simply providing information isn't.
