This paper uses two sets of cross-country micro datasets to analyse individuals' participation in voluntary and community activities and organisations. Analysing countries in the International Adult Literacy Survey and focusing on the impact of human capital I find a consistently positive effect...

In this paper we investigate the way consumption changes around retirement in Italy. Using micro data covering the 1985-96 period, we find that consumption age patterns are similar to those found in the US and other developed countries, despite the much more wide-spread cohabitation of different...

Relative wages vary considerably across regions of the United Kingdom, with skill-abundant regions exhibiting lower skill premia than skill-scarce regions. This paper shows that the location of economic activity is correlated with the variation in relative wages. U.K. regions with low skill...

Until recently, most policy debates on pensions — especially in Europe — focused on public responsibilities and the difficulties that many publicly funded schemes have in meeting their obligations. However, recent events, not least declines in stock markets, have increased the salience of...

This paper examines the corporation tax forecasting techniques used by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. For current year forecasts a judgemental forecast is found to have performed better than relying solely on a simple model or information on the receipts available so far in the current...

We examine the effect on inequality of increasing one income, and show that for two wide classes of indices a benchmark income level or position exists, dividing upper from lower incomes, such that if a lower income is raised, inequality falls, and if an upper income is raised, inequality rises....

This paper considers data quality issues for the analysis of consumption inequality exploiting two complementary datasets from the Consumer Expenditure Survey for the United States. The Interview sample follows survey households over four calendar quarters and consists of retrospectively asked...

This paper examines the role of international trade in the reallocation of U.S. manufacturing activity within and across industries from 1977 to 1997. It introduces a new measure of industry exposure to international trade, motivated by the Heckscher-Ohlin model, which focuses on where imports...

This paper examines the response of industries and firms to changes in trade costs. Several new firm-level models of international trade with heterogeneous firms predict that industry productivity will rise as trade costs fall due to the reallocation of activity across plants within an industry....

This paper examines the corporation tax forecasting techniques used by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. For current year forecasts a judgemental forecast is found to have performed better than relying solely on a simple model or information on the receipts available so far in the current...