The US has legislated to abolish its social security earnings test. A priori it is not possible to predict the effect this will have on work incentives. Using data from the Family Expenditure Survey we show that the abolition of the earnings rule in the UK increased the number of hours worked by...

In this paper a rich and innovative dataset, the International Adult Literacy Survey, is used to examine the impact of functional literacy on earnings. The IALS surveys 12 OECD countries and sub-regions via a consistent questionnaire and includes a number of tests of numeracy and literacy, as...

This paper analyses levels of low literacy across twelve countries using the International Adult Literacy Survey. We go beyond existing work that only looks at the proportions below certain critical levels of literacy. Using methods developed for the measurement of poverty we calculate measures...

This paper analyses the trade-off between the incentive effects of increased uncertainty and the welfare benefits of risk-sharing in the design of optimal tax schedules. We use numerical methods to characterise the tax schedule and to give comparative static results of changing risk aversion,...

We explore the role that economic incentives, particularly changes in wages at the bottom end of the wage distribution, play in determining crime rates. We use data on the police force areas of England and Wales between 1975 and 1996. We find that falls in the wages of unskilled workers leads to...

This chapter reviews developments to improve on the poor performance of the standard GMM estimator for highly autoregressive panel series. It considers the use of the "system" GMM estimator that relies on relatively mild restrictions on the initial condition process. This system GMM estimator...

In this paper we describe the household wealth distribution in the US and UK, and compare both wealth inequality and the form in which wealth is held. Unconditionally, there are large differences in financial wealth between the two countries at the top fifth of the wealth distribution. And even...

This paper presents a life cycle model for the demand for health, and derives empirical specifications that distinguish between permanent and transitory wage responses. Using panel data, we estimate dynamic health and health input demand equations. We find evidence of negative transitory wage...

This paper investigates the relationship between export market shares and relative unit labour costs using a long panel of twelve manufacturing industries across fourteen OECD countries. We ask two questions: (a) how sensitive are export market shares to changes in relative costs and (b) what...

In this paper we examine the panel data estimation of dynamic models for count data that include correlated fixed effects and predetermined variables.