It is common to analyse poverty data broken down by household or economic status. Implicitly, it is assumed that people change state (for example, single, married, children, no children) for exogenous reasons. If we bring economic behaviour into the problem, then such transitions become...

The late 1980s saw a dramatic fall in personal saving rates in Britain and the United States which attracted the attention of academics and policymakers alike. The period was also marked by a number of important structural changes, any or all of which could have had an impact on personal saving...