This study uses the first twelve waves of the British Household Panel Survey covering the period 1991-2002 to investigate the extent of constraints on desired hours of work within jobs and the degree of flexibility of the labour market for a sample of women. Our main findings are as follows....

This paper assesses the accuracy of decomposing income risk into permanent and transitory components using income and consumption data. We develop a specific approximation to the optimal consumption growth rule and use Monte Carlo evidence to show that this approximation can provide a robust...

The fiscal and distributive impacts of three reforms to the social security pension system in the UK are evaluated. All three reforms are designed to increase the retirement age by changing the incentive structure underlying the pension system. The first increases the state pension age by three...

This paper examines changes in the distribution of wages using bounds to allow for the impact of non-random selection into work. We show that bounds constructed without any economic or statistical assumptions can be informative. However, since employment rates in the UK are often low they are...

This paper uses panel data on household consumption and income to evaluate the degree of insurance to income shocks. Our aim is to describe the transmission of income inequality into consumption inequality. Our framework nests the special cases of self-insurance and the complete markets...

In this paper we analyse productivity spillovers from foreign direct investment using firm level panel data UK manufacturing industries from 1992 to 1999. We investigate spillovers through horizontal, backward and forward linkages, distinguish spillovers from export oriented vs domestic market...

This Paper calculates returns to scale (RTS) and productivity growth in UK manufacturing establishments in the electronics and food industries. Our results show that foreign establishments tend to have lower returns to scale than their domestic counterparts. We also examine the effect of the...

This Paper investigates whether the acquisition of a domestic establishment by a foreign owner has any effects, positive or negative, on the survival prospects and employment growth of that plant. The empirical analysis uses data from the Annual Respondents Database (ARD) for the UK electronics...