The analysis uses a unique set of data matching mothers and their young adult children to study the impact of family background on young people’s educational attainments. The data is derived from the first five years (1991–5) of the British Household Panel Study. Mother’s education is...

The MRC National Survey of Health and Development provides data on the hourly pay of males and females at age 26 in 1972 and in 1977. These have been subjected to regression analysis to see how far the gap between men's and women's pay is statistically explicable by (a) a "human capital" model...

The opportunity costs of rearing British children, in terms of cash earnings forgone by their mother, are estimated for a typical family. Data from the 1980 Women and Employment Survey provide estimates for hourly pay as a function of work experience and current hours of work. In addition, these...

The paper develops two models in which parents support their adult child’s human capital investment through financial transfers and/or coresidence. In one, parents are altruistic, and in the other they make loans to children for purely selfish reasons. Econometric estimates using the first...

For the first time, nationally representative data on women's employment histories are used to study the gap between women's and men's pay in Great Britain. It is decomposed into a gap attributable to gender differences in human capital characteristics (such as education, work experience, and...

Models to explain the chances of economic activity, employment and full-time work in a national cross-section of British women in 1980 in terms of a number of demographic and economic variables are estimated by OLS. Marital status differentials are minor once the presence of dependent children...