Friedman's book on the Óƒonsumption FunctionÔ is one of the great works of Economics demonstrating how the interplay between theoretical ideas and data analysis could lead to major policy implications. We present a short review of Friedman's Permanent Income Hypothesis, the origins of the...

We examine the contribution of human capital to economy-wide technological improvements through the two channels of innovation and imitation. We develop a theoretical model showing that skilled labor has a higher growth-enhancing effect closer to the technological frontier under the reasonable...

This paper describes tax reforms in OECD countries over the last 20 years and how they are related to tax competition. Both individual countries' reforms and multilateral initiatives and developments are covered. This is followed by an overview of the empirical evidence on tax competition. Our...

This paper investigates the determinants of vertical integration using data from the UK manufacturing sector. We find that the relationship between a downstream (producer) industry and an upstream (supplier) industry us more likely to be vertically integrated when the producing industry is more...

This paper describes the transmission of income inequality into consumption inequality and in so doing investigates the degree of insurance to income shocks. It combines panel data on income from the PSID with consumption data from repeated CEX cross-sections and distinguishes between permanent...

There is renewed concern that in spite of overall improvements in health racial and ethnic disparities in health persist and in some cases may even have expanded. Ethnic health disparities are inherently linked to immigration since ethnic identities are traced to the country of origin of an...

This paper provides a discussion of stamp duty and its effects. This is followed by an empirical study using changes in the rate of stamp duty in the UK as natural experiments. Because shares will be affected differently depending on how frequently they are traded, we can employ a...

This paper uses UK panel data to shed further light on the fall in spending at retirement (the “retirement-consumption puzzle”). It compares the profiles of spending and well-being at retirement for different groups, defined according to whether retirement is voluntary or involuntary. Where...

This paper studies the determinants of partnership dissolution and focuses on the role of child support. We exploit the variation in child support liabilities driven by an important UK policy reform to separately identify the effects of children from the effect of child support liability. We...

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)’s Pensim2 model is a dynamic microsimulation model. The principal purpose of this model is to estimate the future distribution of pensioner incomes, thus enabling analysis of the distributional effects of proposed changes to pension policy. This paper...