A series of reforms to help low income families with children were introduced in the UK in 1999, including in-work tax credits and welfare-to-work programmes. Lone parents were a key target for these reforms - they comprised 22% of all families by 1998 but 55% of families with children in...

Whether public sector projects should be discounted at a lower rate than private sector projects is highly contentious. This paper assesses the appropriate private and public sector discount rates in the context of public private partnerships. It shows that there are powerful arguments for using...

This article discusses proposed governance reforms of legal services markets. The model distinguishes between a status quo position supported by a system of professionally enforced collective reputation and forms of governance based more squarely on market mechanisms. We identify a number of...

This article uses data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) to shed further light on the fall in consumption at retirement (the 'retirement-consumption puzzle'). Comparing food spending of men retiring involuntarily early (through ill health or redundancy) with spending of men who...

High effective tax rates on work at and around state pension age deter participation. An example is the "earnings test" operating in several OECD countries. The United States abolished its test for the 65+ age group in 2000. The United Kingdom offers a "natural experiment" of this reform, as it...

This mix of state and private pension provision in the United Kingdom provides a rare degree of variation in pension incentives for retirement. Using a sample of individuals from the UK Retirement Survey, the paper models the probability of retirement in terms of the incentives underlying the...

We analyse in detail the factors that lead to intergenerational persistence among sons, where this is measured as the association between childhood family income and later adult earnings. We seek to account for the level of income persistence in the 1970 BCS cohort and also to explore the...