Education has an important effect on wages but it not clear whether this is because education raises productivity or because education is simply a signal of ability. We implement a number of existing tests for discriminating between these two explanations and find that they do not support the...

This article studies the determinants of partnership dissolution and focuses on the role of child support. We exploit the variation in child support liabilities and entitlements driven, in part, by the introduction of a new set of complex rules that determined child support liability in the UK,...

This paper uses revealed preference restrictions and nonparametric statistical methods to bound the true cost-of-living index which corresponds most closely to the UK Retail Prices Index (RPI). This is used to assess the RPI formula for substitution bias. We show that neither the direction nor...

Official estimates of housing benefit take-up rates suggest that up to two million families in the United Kingdom ma y not be receiving the help with their housing costs to which they ar e entitled. The authors' interest in the take-up of means tested bene fits is therefore motivated by two...

The relationship between housing costs, wages and transfer programmes is complex yet helps determine the incentive to work for individuals in low income or high housing cost households. We estimate a static discrete choice labour supply model that allows for housing benefit programme...

In-work transfer schemes have recently been suggested as a device for encouraging labor force participation and reducing the severity of the disincentives associated with out-of-work income support schemes. Here the authors estimate a discrete choice labor supply model which allows for...

This paper outlines the issues relevant to the design of pari-mutuel lottery games and makes inferences about game design effects from estimates of how rollovers affect sales. Lottery tickets sales depend positively on the proportion of revenue returned as prizes, positively on the skewness of...