We present a new class of social cost-of-living indices and a nonparametric framework for estimating these and other social cost-of-living indices. Common social cost-of-living indices can be understood as aggregator functions of approximations of individual cost-of-living indices. The Consumer...

This paper reviews various techniques for quantifying financial incentives to work, shows how financial work incentives have changed across the population since 1979, and estimates how much of these changes are due to changes in the tax and benefit system.

This paper considers how competition can affect aggregate innovative activity through its effects on firms’ decision whether or not to vertically integrate. A moderate increase in competition enhances innovation incentives, too much competition discourages innovative effort. These effects...

This paper presents the trends seen over the last quarter of the 20th Century in various indicators of the well-being of the elderly alongside those seen for the young. Specifically we look at measures of both the level and distribution of income and expenditure, and self-reported measures of...

Although the theoretical case for universal pre-primary education is strong, the empirical foundation is weak. In this paper, we contribute to the empirical case by investigating the effect of a large expansion of universal pre-primary education on subsequent primary school performance in...

The evaluation of interventions has become a commonly used policy tool, which is frequently adopted to improve the transparency and effectiveness of public policy. However, evaluation methods based on comparing treatment and control groups in small scale trials are not capable of providing a...

This paper aims to review the techniques and methods which have been developed by researchers to study labour supply and employment, unemployment and inactivity in the labour market. Progress in labour supply modelling in the last thirty years or so has been considerable. Firstly, the theory of...

Recall food consumption data, which is the basis of a great deal of empirical work, is believed to suffer from considerable measurement error. Diary records are believed to be very accurate. We study a unique data set that collects recall and diary data from the same households. Measurement...

As the degree to which individuals are expected to provide their own resources for retirement increases, there is a correspondingly increasing importance of individuals being able to understand the financial choices they face and to choose savings products, portfolios and contribution rates...

This paper develops a new approach to study how electoral bias in favor of one party due to the pattern of districting affects policy choice. We tie a commonly used measure of districting bias to the theory of party competition and show how this affects policy choice in theory. The utility of...