Education is often regarded as a route to social mobility. For this to be the case, however, the link between family background and adult outcomes must be broken (or at least reduced) once we take account of an individual's education history. This paper focuses on individuals who have completed...

This paper sets out revealed preference tests for different models of consumption behaviour over retirement that we applied to a Spanish consumption panel dataset. We reject the perfect foresight model both with separable preferences and allowing for preference change. The first order conditions...

We develop a novel framework to analyze the structural implications of the marriage market for household consumption. We define a revealed preference characterization of efficient household consumption when the marriage is stable. Stability means that the marriage matching is individually...

We examine the impact of housing wealth on labor supply decisions using data on exogenous local variation in house prices merged into household panel data for Britain. Our estimates are conditioned on variations in local labor demand and income expectations as these may co-determine housing...

What shapes the optimal degree of progressivity of the tax and transfer system? On the one hand, a progressive tax system can counteract inequality in initial conditions and substitute for imperfect private insurance against idiosyncratic earnings risk. At the same time, progressivity reduces...

Much of the focus of the UK pensions policy debate over the past decade has been on the adequacy (or otherwise) of private retirement saving. In this paper, we present the first assessment of the optimality of the retirement resources of English couple households born in the 1940s. Here,...

Parents preferring sons tend to go on to have more children until one or more boys are born, and to concentrate investment in boys for a given sibsize. Therefore, having a brother may affect child outcomes in two ways: indirectly, by decreasing sibsize, and directly, where sibsize remains...

We evaluate the large scale pilot of an innovative and major welfare intervention in Colombia, which combines homes visits by trained social workers to households in extreme poverty with preferential access to social programs. We use a randomized control trial and a very rich dataset collected...

Using a model where households can save in either a safe asset or in an illiquid, tax-advantaged pension, we assess the extent to which those who recently reached the state pension age in the UK have saved optimally for retirement. The policy environment specified closely matches that prevailing...

We investigate the impact on social welfare of the UK policy introduced in 1980 by which public housing tenants (council housing in UK parlance) had the right to purchase their houses at heavily discounted prices. This was known as the Right to Buy (RTB) policy. Although this...