This paper provides evidence that daughters make people more left-wing. Having sons, by contrast, makes them more right-wing. Parents, politicians and voters are probably not aware of this phenomenon - nor are social scientists. The paper discusses its economic and evolutionary roots. It also...

This paper studies the mental distress caused by bereavement. The largest emotional losses are from the death of a spouse; the second-worst in severity are the losses from the death of a child; the third-worst is the death of a parent. The paper explores how happiness regression equations might be...

This paper uses British panel data to investigate single women’s labour supply changes in response to three tax and benefit policy reforms that occurred in the 1990s. These reforms changed individuals' work incentives and we use them to identify changes in labour supply. We find evidence of...

This paper documents evidence that rejects the paradox of dissatisfied union members. Using eleven waves of the BHPS, it studies the past, contemporaneous, and future effects of union membership on job satisfaction. By separating union free-riders from other nonmembers in the fixed effects...

This paper estimates the exogenous effect of schooling on reduced incidence of hypertension. Using the changes in the minimum school-leaving age law in the United Kingdom from age 14 to 15 in 1947, and from age 15 to 16 in 1973, as sources of exogenous variation in schooling, the regression...

Does more schooling causes a delay in marriage? Using a nationwide change in the compulsory schooling law in the UK as a source of exogenous variation in education, this paper estimates the causal effect of schooling on age at first marriage. The 1947 reform, which uniquely affected about a half...

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...