Implementation of broad approaches to welfare analysis usually entails the use of 'subjective' welfare indicators. We analyse BHPS data on financial wellbeing to determine whether reported current and retrospective perceptions are consistent with each other and with the existence of a common...

Factor rotation is widely used to interpret the estimated factor loadings from latent variable models. Rotation methods embody a priori concepts of `complexity' of factor structures, which they seek to minimise. Surprisingly, it is rare for researchers to exploit one of the most common and...

Research on the socioeconomic determinants of health is often based on parental assessments of their children?s health. We assess this approach by comparing directly evaluations from parents, teachers, children and psychiatrists of three aspects of child mental health from two major UK surveys....

We investigate the consequences of using time-invariant individual effects in panel data models when the unobservables are in fact time-varying. Using data from the British Offending Crime and Justice panel, we estimate a dynamic factor model of the occurrence of a range of illicit activities as...

We construct linked register data on five Norwegian birth cohorts, covering: criminal charges after age 15; family characteristics and history up to age 15; and (for males) IQ test scores. A longitudinal analysis of the risk of initiation into crime in early adulthood suggests an increased risk for...

We examine the effect of survey measurement error on the empirical relationship between child mental health and personal and family characteristics, and between child mental health and educational progress. Our contribution is to use unique UK survey data that contains (potentially biased)...

We provide a critical discussion of the concept drug-related crime and review methods for estimating its volume, emphasising the importance of an appropriately defined counterfactual. We then construct new estimates for England and Wales in 2003-6, combining data from the Arrestee Survey and...

We consider the estimation of measures of persistent poverty in panel surveys with missing data, focusing on the persistent poverty headcount, its duration-adjusted variant, and a related measure used by the European Union as an indicator of the risk of persistent poverty. We develop a partial...

We investigate the nature and origin of comorbidity, defined as the tendency of members of marital couples to display correlated patterns of ill-health in later life. In the absence of long-term prospective data on couples, we use long-range recall data from the pan-European SHARELife survey and...

We study the relationship between individuals' participation in household panels, their health and employment states and the design of survey fieldwork procedures, using a comparative approach based on data from the UK BHPS and Australian HILDA Survey. We simulate the impact of alternative...