One theory for why there is a strong education gradient in health outcomes is that more educated individuals more quickly absorb new information about health technology. The MMR controversy in the UK provides a case where, for a brief period of time, some highly publicized research suggested...

This paper considers a simple model of self-fulfilling expectations that leads to a multiple equilibrium of gender gaps in wages and participation rates. Rather than resorting to moral hazard problems related to unobservable effort, like in most of the related literature, our model fully relies...

Using microdata from the 2000 U.S. Census, we analyze the responses of Mexican Americans to questions that independently elicit their ethnicity (or Hispanic origin) and their ancestry. We investigate whether different patterns of responses to these questions reflect varying degrees of ethnic...

Little is known about why cohabiting couples have fewer children than married couples. Weexplore the factors that explain the difference in fertility between these two groups using aswitching regression analysis, which enables us to quantify the contribution of differentfactors through a...

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

This paper examines the effects of the Working Families´ Tax Credit (WFTC) on couples inBritain. We develop a simple model of household decisions which explicitly accounts for therole played by the tax and benefit system. Its main implications are then tested using paneldata from the British...

This paper provides a longitudinal perspective on changes in Spanish male earnings inequality for the period 1993-2000, by decomposing the earnings covariance structure into its permanent and transitory parts. According to the Spanish sample of the European Community Household Panel,...

This paper investigates the evolution of earnings inequality in urban China from 1989 to2006. After decomposing the variance of log of earnings into transitory and permanent twoparts, we find that both components are important contributors to the total variance ofearnings. We also find that the...

This study analyses the development of the economic well-being of the elderly in Swedensince 1990 - a period characterized by increased influence from the financial market andextreme economic events - using data from the Household Income Survey. The elderly werenot isolated as pensions were cut,...

This paper proposes a new unified theory of sociobehavioral forces. The goal of the new theory isto integrate theories describing five sociobehavioral processes - comparison (including justiceand self-esteem), status, power, identity, and happiness - bringing under a single theoreticalumbrella...