How will countries handle idiosyncratic national macroeconomic shocks under the European single currency? The ways in which European countries now react to internally asymmetric shocks provide a better forecast than do the regional response pattern of the United States. In this paper we compare...

We describe the history of state pension policy in the UK since 1948 and calculate summary measures of the generosity of the system over time and the degree to which the it created implicit taxes on, or subsidies to, work at older ages. The time series of these measures, calculated separately...

We use data from the Whitehall II study to examine the potential role played by early-life health and circumstances in determining health and employment status in middle and older ages. The population from which the Whitehall II cohort was drawn consisted almost exclusively of white collar civil...

This paper reexamines differences found between income gradients in American and English children's health, in results originally published by Case, Lubotsky and Paxson (2002) for the US, and by Currie, Shields and Wheatley Price (2007) for England. We find that, when the English sample is...

It has long been recognized that taller adults hold jobs of higher status and, on average, earn more than other workers. A large number of hypotheses have been put forward to explain the association between height and earnings. In developed countries, researchers have emphasized factors such as...

We characterize the response of U.S., German and British stock, bond and foreign exchange markets to real-time U.S. macroeconomic news. Our analysis is based on a unique data set of high-frequency futures returns for each of the markets. We find that news surprises produce conditional mean...

In this paper we use the two waves of the British Retirement Survey (1988/89 and 1994) to quantify the relationship between socio-economic status and health outcomes. We find that, even after conditioning on the initial health status, wealth rankings are important determinants of mortality and...

We present theory and evidence that challenges the view that forward premia contain little information regarding subsequent spot rate movements. Using weekly dollar-mark and dollar sterling data, we find that spot and forward exchange rates together are well represented by a vector error...

This paper estimates how much additional work capacity there might be among men and women aged between 55 and 74 in the United Kingdom, given their health, and how this has evolved over the last decade. The objective is not to suggest how much older people should work but rather to shed light on...

This paper explores the impact of immigrants on the imports, exports and productivity of service-producing firms in the U.K. Immigrants may substitute for imported intermediate inputs (offshore production) and they may impact the productivity of the firm as well as its export behavior. The first...