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 pursue an economic approach to analysing poverty. This requires a focus on the variables that individuals can influence, such as forming or dissolving a union or having children. We argue that this indirect approach to modelling poverty is the right way to bring economic tools to bear on the...

We study the intergenerational effects of parents’ education on their children’s educational outcomes. The endogeneity of parental education is addressed by exploiting the exogenous shift in education levels induced by the 1972 Raising of the School Leaving Age (RoSLA) from age 15 to 16 in...

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...

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...

We provide evidence on the extent of ethnic segregation experienced by children across secondary schools and neighbourhoods (wards). Using 2001 Schools Census and Population Census data we employ the indices of dissimilarity and isolation and compare patterns of segregation across nine ethnic...

We exploit a universe dataset of state school students in England with linked test score records to document the evolution of attainment through school for different ethnic groups. The analysis yields a number of striking findings. First, we show that, controlling for personal characteristics,...

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....