We provide a critique of the methods that have been used to derive measures of income risk and draw attention to the importance of demographic factors as a source of income risk. We also propose new measures of the contribution to total income risk of demographic and labour market factors....

We compare patterns of movements into and out of poverty by children in Britain and Germany using data from the British Household Panel Survey and the German Socio-Economic Panel for the period 1992-7. Compared to Germany, in Britain poverty persistence is greater, and poverty exit rates in...

Estimates of UK income inequality trends differ substantially according to whether estimates are based on household survey data (used for official statistics) or tax return data (used in the top incomes literature). We reconcile differences in variable definitions and combine survey and tax...

We examine the determinants of low income transitions using first-order Markov models that control for initial conditions effects (those found to be poor in the base year may be a non-random sample) and for attrition (panel retention may also be non-random). Our econometric model is a form of...

We propose a framework for comparing the relationship between poverty and personal characteristics across countries (or across years), and use it to compare levels and patterns of relative poverty in the USA, Great Britain and Germany during the 1990s. The higher aggregate poverty rates in the...

Applying a method suggested by Woodruff (1971), we derive the sampling variances of Generalized Entropy and Atkinson inequality indices when estimated from complex survey data. It turns out that this method also greatly simplifies the calculations for the i.i.d. case when compared to previous...

We hypothesize that an individual's time use choices are contingent on the time use choices of others because the utility derived from leisure time often benefits from the presence of companionable others inside and outside the household. We develop a model of time use, and demonstrate that its...