Public spending in the UK in 2008/9 amounted to over £10,000 per person or about 43% of national income (Crawford, Emmerson and Tetlow 2009) while net receipts from tax and social security contributions exceeded £8,000 per person or about 35% of national income. These transfers of resources...

Using a lifecycle model of consumption, saving and portfolio choice combined with linked survey and administrative data on wealth and lifetime earnings we evaluate measures of retirement preparedness. We estimate heterogeneous discount factors for households and compare these estimates of their...

Government transfers to individuals are often given labels indicating that they are designed to support the consumption of particular goods. Standard economic theory implies that the labeling of cash transfers or cash-equivalents should have no effect on spending patterns. We study the UK Winter...

Whether higher lifetime income households do save a larger share of their income is one of the longstanding empirical questions in economics that has been surprisingly difficult to answer. We use both consumption data and a new dataset containing both individual survey data on wealth holdings...

This paper suggests a method for estimating the distribution of discount rates using panel data on income and wealth. Using the English Longitudinal Survey of Ageing (ELSA), a representative sample of the English popularion over age 50, we general panel date on total consumption from the...

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...

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,...

This paper compares consumption and income as measures of households' living standards using UK data. It presents evidence that income is likely to be under-recorded for households with low resources. It describes the different impressions one gets about trends in the level and inequality of...