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...

In this paper we provide evidence on how the UK government’s welfare reforms since 1998 have affected the material well-being of children in low-income families. We examine changes in expenditure patterns and ownership of durable goods for low- and higher-income families between the pre-reform...

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...

The recession of 2008-2009 inflicted a larger cumulative loss of UK output than any of the other post-war recessions. Nevertheless, employment rates remained higher than might have been expected given the experience of previous recessions. The main reasons for this appear to be a combination of...

Individual and household based aggregate measures of joblessness can, and do, offer conflicting signals about labour market performance if work is unequally distributed. This paper introduces a simple set of indices that can be used to measure the extent of divergence between individual and...

This paper analyses the increase in mothers¿ employment in Britain over the period 1974¿2000. The approach consists of isolating those birth cohorts whose mothers experienced significant increases in employment and relating those to changes in policies (maternity rights, taxation and...

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...

Individual and household based aggregate measures of worklessness can, and do, offer conflicting signals about labour market performance. We outline a means of quantifying the extent of any disparity, (polarisation), in the signals stemming from individual and household-based measures of...