In this paper we investigate the size of health differences that exist among men in England and the United States and how those differences vary by Socio-Economic Status (SES) in both countries. Three SES measures are emphasized - education, household income, and household wealth - and the...

There is renewed interest in why people of lower socio-economic status (SES) have worse health outcomes. No matter which measures of SES are used (income, wealth, or education), the evidence that this association is large is abundant (Marmot (1999), Smith (1999)). The relation between SES and...

Recent theoretical work has shown the importance of measuring microeconomic uncertainty for models of both general and partial equilibrium under imperfect insurance. In this paper the assumption of i.i.d. income innovations used in previous empirical studies is removed and the focus of the...

This paper looks at the links between health and socio-economic status. It is generally assumed by non-economists that it is low SES that causes ill health, but this paper asks whether the causation might also work the other way. Even if the direction of causation is that SES mainly affects...

In this paper we study the sources of wage growth. We identify the contribution to such growth of general, sector specific and firm specific human capital. Our results are interpretable within the context of a model where the returns to human capital may be heterogeneous and where firms may...

In this paper we describe the household wealth distribution in the US and UK, and compare both wealth inequality and the form in which wealth is held. Unconditionally, there are large differences in financial wealth between the two countries at the top fifth of the wealth distribution. And even...

The 1996 PRWORA reform introduced time limits on the receipt of welfare in the United States. We use variation by state and across demographic groups to provide reduced form evidence showing that such limits led to a fall in welfare claims (partly due to "banking" benefi ts for future use), a...

This paper examines the equilibrium effects of alternative financial aid policies intended to promote college participation. We build an overlapping generations life cycle model with education, labor supply, and consumption/saving decisions. Cognitive and non-cognitive skills of children depend...

In this paper we document significantly steeper declines in nondurable expenditures in the UK compared to the US, in spite of income paths being similar. We explore several possible causes, including different employment paths, housing ownership and expenses, levels and paths of health status,...

The extent to which like-with like marry is particularly important for inequality as well as for the outcomes of children that result from the union. In this paper we discuss approaches to the measurement of changes in assortative mating. We derive two key conditions that a well-defined measure...