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

This paper estimates a model of dynamic intrahousehold investment behavior which incorporates family fixed effects and child endowment heterogeneity. This framework is applied to large American and British survey data on birth outcomes, with focus on the effects of antenatal parental smoking and...

This paper investigates the robustness of recent findings on the effect of parental background on child health. We are particularly concerned with the extent to which their finding that income effects on child health are the result of spurious correlation rather than some causal mechanism. A...

This paper formulates a model to examine the effects of changes in tax-benefit policy on the behavior of divorced parents and the well-being of children in single-parent households. Noncustodial parents choose the level of a child support payment to transfer to custodians. These, in turn, decide...

Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, this study examines the relationship between several outcomes in early adulthood (e.g., education, inactivity, earnings, and health) and being born to a teenage mother. Besides standard cross-sectional multivariate regression estimates, we also...

Toyboy marriages (where the female partner is at least 5 years older than her male partner) have grown threefold since the 1970s in the United States and Britain. This paper examines this phenomenon using an equilibrium search framework in which becoming successful in the labour market takes...

This paper presents the conditions under which a causal interpretation can be given to the association between childhood parental employment and subsequent education of children. In a model in which parental preferences are separable in own consumption and children's wellbeing, estimation is...

In Britain about 7% of male employees and 10% of female employees are in temporary jobs. In contrast to much of continental Europe, this proportion has been relatively stable over the 1990s. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, we find that temporary workers report lower levels of...

This paper explores the relationship between non-standard types of employment and mental health. The analysis uses data on workers from the first seven waves of the British Household Panel Study, 1991-97. Four different types of non-standard employment (non-standard contracts, places, times, and...

This paper investigates the relationship between personality traits in adolescence and performance in high school using a large and recent cohort study. In particular, we investigate the impact of locus of control, self-esteem and work ethics at age 15, on test scores at age 16, and on subject...