We consider three broad types of employment contract vis, self-employment, PRP, and fixed wage employment. We focus on the implied degree of income risk associated with each type of employment contract, arguing that such risk falls as we move from self-employment at one extreme to fixed wage...

This paper argues that preconditions for welfare benefit entitlements based on labour market prospects can be counterproductive when they create an incentive for individuals to abstain from any investment earlier in life that could improve future prospects. Benefit entitlements based partly on...

Terrorist attacks such as the attacks on the World Trade Centre in September 2001 have generated new interest in the debate on capital punishment. It has been suggested that support for the death penalty could be higher in the wake of terrorist activity. Using data from the Australian Election...

In a recent article, Zhang and Hoffman discuss the use of discrete choice logit models in sociological research. In the present article, the authors estimate a multinomial logit model of U.K. Magistrates Courts sentencing using a data set collected by the National Association for the Care and...

There is no qualitative dependent model that can simultaneously account for data sets in which the variable of interest has both a multi-modal distribution and is potentially ordered. Such a multimodal distribution may be the result of individuals being captive to particular choices. Such a case...

A plethora of tests for the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA) property of Logit models of discrete choice behavior has been proposed in the literature. These tests are based upon asymptotic arguments and little is known about their size and power properties in finite samples. This...

We explore the possibility that a systematic relationship exists between employment within a particular type of contract and risk preference. We exploit a set of proxies for risk preference, whereby some of the proxies capture risk loving behaviour (expenditure on gambling, smoking and alcohol)...