The combination of credit constraints and indivisible consumption goods may induce some risk-averse individuals to gamble to have a chance of crossing a purchasing threshold. One implication of this is that income effects for individuals who choose to gamble are likely to be larger than for the...

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...

A series of reforms to help low income families with children were introduced in the UK in 1999, including in-work tax credits and welfare-to-work programmes. Lone parents were a key target for these reforms - they comprised 22% of all families by 1998 but 55% of families with children in...

This article uses data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) to shed further light on the fall in consumption at retirement (the 'retirement-consumption puzzle'). Comparing food spending of men retiring involuntarily early (through ill health or redundancy) with spending of men who...

There is a widespread belief that peer effects are important in charitable giving, but surprisingly little evidence on how donors respond to their peers in practice. Analysing a unique dataset of donations to online fundraising pages, we show that peer effects are positive and sizeable: a £10...

We study charitable giving within social groups. Exploiting a unique dataset, we establish three key relationships between social group size and fundraising outcomes: (i) a positive relationship between group size and the total number of donations; (ii) a negative relationship between group size...