Waiting times for hospital care are a significant issue in the UK National Health Service. The reforms of the health service in 1990 gave a subset of family doctors (GP fundholders) both the ability to choose the hospital where their patients were treated and the means to pay for some services....

Given a general belief that jobs last longer in tightly regulated labour markets, the presumption would be that jobs last longer in Italy than they do in Britain. We use two large micro datasets to address this issue. Surprisingly, we find a higher proportion of male workers in Britain than in...

There continues to be much debate about whether the widescale adoption of new technologies, and the increasing intensity of competition through globalization of product markets have lead to significant changes in job tenure distributions. Our previous work showed that this was not the case at...

We examine 17 years of a large cross-section to build up a picture of job tenure in Britain. We show that men (women) can expect to hold their present job for about 18 (12) years. These summarize bimodal distributions, with one mode at short tenures, and one at very long tenures. We find some...

This paper examines the determinants of the demand for private health insurance in the UK from 1978 to 1996. The focus is the impact of public and private sector quality on demand. Use of a pseudo-cohort panel allows examination of generational change and the investigation of dynamics. The...

The Paper investigates the relationship of work and family life in Britain. Using hazard regression techniques we estimate a five-equation model, which includes birth events, union formation, union dissolution, employment and non-employment events. The model allows for unobserved heterogeneity...

Using a unique dataset, we present evidence on income trajectories of people living in micro neighbourhoods. We place bounds on the influence of neighbourhood making as few parametric assumptions as possible. The Paper offers a number of advances. We exploit a dataset that is large,...

This paper characterizes the nature of poverty from a dynamic life-cycle perspective. Using panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we find that 40% of young Americans experienced at least one year of poverty, and most of these experienced one or two years. A significant...

Payer-driven competition has been widely advocated as a means of increasing efficiency in health care markets. The 1990s reforms to the UK health service followed this path. We examine whether competition led to better outcomes for patients, as measured by death rates after treatment following...

We investigate the importance of economic factors in young Americans’ decisions to form and dissolve households. We adopt a search theoretic framework to analyse the decisions to: leave the parental home; form a marriage or partnership; and dissolve a marriage or partnership. We focus, in...