This paper argues that public holidays facilitate the co-ordination of leisure time but do not constrain the annual amount of leisure. Public holidays therefore have benefits both in the utility of leisure on holidays and (by enabling people to maintain social contacts more easily) in increasing...

This paper analyzes the relationship between macroeconomic factors and the income distribution using data on equivalized disposable household income from the United Kingdom for 1961–99. We argue in favour of fitting a parametric functional form to the income distribution for each year, and...