Government policies toward the financial sector of an economy can distort both the cost of borrowing and the return to saving. Such policies involve restrictions on the degree of competition in the financial sector, the deposit rates set by the banks, and on reserves held by banks. Determining...

The paper compares the change in pension plan coverage in the 1980s in the US and the UK. Like the US, the UK has seen a decline in pension plan membership among men, a growth in the use of defined pension plans, and in the purchase of retirement savings accounts. Changes in workforce...

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The Hicks-Leontief composite commodity theorem permits aggregation of sets of goods that have identical price movements into composite groups of goods, each of which can be treated like a single good for demand analysis. Here Hicks-Leontief is generalized by permitting composite commodities to...

This paper presents a revealed preference method for calculating a lower bound on the virtual price of new goods and suggests a way to improve these bounds by using non-parametric expansion paths. This allows the calculation of cost-of-living and price indices when the number of goods changes...

In this paper we consider estimation of the autoregressive error components model. When the autoregressive parameter is moderately large and the number of time series observations is moderately small, the usual Generalised Methods of Moments (GMM) estimator obtained after first differencing has...

The modern life cycle theory of consumption predicts dissaving of assets during retirement. But evidence suggests that dissaving occurs at a relatively slow rate, so that many households bequeath assets. Evidence from the Retirement Survey in Britain suggests that the portfolio of bequeathable...

Our paper evaluates the labour supply effects of 'in work' benefit reforms in the UK, using the means-tested benefit reforms of July 1995 as an example. The reforms increased the generosity of all UK 'in work' benefits for those working more than 30 hours a week . This was a response to concerns...

This paper develops a new separability concept - latent separability. This is shown to provide a useful empirical and theoretical framework for investigating the grouping of goods and prices. It is a generalisation of weak separability in which groups are identified by specific exclusive goods...

This paper contrasts Samuelson's (1964) definition of "true economic depreciation" with the use of this term that has become standard in the more recent literature on neutral business taxes. Samuelson defined "economic depreciation" to be the change in the economic value of an asset, whilst the...