Family Credit and ist successor the WFTC, have been central to the British welfare reform debate in reacent years. This debate in informed by tax benefit modelling, yet accurate modelling of Family Credit is fraught with potential problems. The main model input data are found to under-sample...

This paper addresses the intergeneration transmission of education and investigates the extent to which early school leaving (at age 16) may be due to variations in permanent income, parental education levels, and shocks to income at this age. Least squares estimation reveals conventional...

The UK's Labour Government has expanded means-testing of social security but attempted to do so while minimising the disincentive effects typically associated with such an approach. We test whether it has succeeded by reviewing the effect of 5 years of reforms on a range of incentives across the...

The current Labour Government was elected in 1997 with few specific social security proposals. This paper argues that after five years, consistent trends in social security policy have emerged: there is a willingness to increase benefits; a “work-first” focus; increasing centrality for...

We study the intergenerational effects of maternal education on children's cognitive achievement, behavioral problems, grade repetition and obesity. We address endogeneity of maternal schooling by instrumenting with variation in schooling costs when the mother grew up. Using matched data from...