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 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...

Marriage data show a strong degree of positive assortative mating along a variety of attributes. But since marriage is an equilibrium outcome, it is unclear whether positive sorting is the result of preferences rather than opportunities. We assess the relative importance of preferences and...

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...

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

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 investigates the effects of housing price risk on housing choices over the lifecycle. Housing price risk can be substantial but, unlike other risky assets which people can avoid, the fact that most people will eventually own their home creates an insurance demand for housing assets...

This paper investigates the effects of housing price risk on housing choices over the lifecycle. Housing price risk can be substantial but, unlike other risky assets which people can avoid, the fact that most people will eventually own their home creates an insurance demand for housing assets...