This paper uses data from the British Household Panel Survey to shed further light on the fall in spending at retirement (the “retirement-consumption puzzle”). Comparing food spending for men retiring involuntarily early (through ill health or redundancy) with spending for those who retire...

With a move away from up-front charges following the introduction of stakeholder pensions, consumers are no longer penalised for lapsing on many long-term savings policies. Nevertheless, persistency rates may still provide an (imperfect) indicator of sales quality and provide some information on...

The paper investigates the relationship between work and family life in Britain. Using appropriate statistical 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...

We examine whether unemployment early in an individual's career influences her later employment prospects. We use six years of the LFS to create pseudo-cohorts and exploit cross-cohort variation in unemployment at school-leaving age to identify this. We find heterogeneous responses: for the...

This paper explores the links between school, family and area background influences during adolescence and later adult economic outcomes. The empirical analysis is based on data covering the period 1979 to 1996, drawn from the 1979 US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. For a sample of...

There is a growing literature that shows that higher family income is associated with better health for children. Wealthier parents may have more advantaged children because they have more income to buy health care or because parental wealth is associated with beneficial behaviours or because...

We provide a critique of the methods that have been used to derive measures of income risk and draw attention to the importance of demographic factors as a source of income risk. We also propose new measures of the contribution to total income risk of demographic and labour market factors....

The rise in inequality and poverty is one of the most important economic and social issues in recent times. But in contrast to the literature on individual earnings inequality, there has been little work modelling (as opposed to documenting) household income dynamics. This is largely because of...

Asthma is the most common chronic disease of childhood. Recent evidence has shown a socio-economic gradient in its distribution. This paper examines whether a number of factors argued to have led to a rise in the incidence of asthma might also explain the social gradient. Several of these have...