We examine the role of ill-health in retirement decisions in Britain, using the first eight waves of the British Household Panel Survey (1991-98). As self-reported health status is likely to be endogenous to the retirement decision, we instrument self-reported health by a constructed Ѩealth...

This paper examines changes in health and disability related transfers in the UK over the last thirty years, and describes how they are related to changes in labour force participation. The objective is to present a comprehensive description of the reforms to the institutional setting, along...

This paper tries to assess whether or not we have any empirical evidence of links between early retirement and youth unemployment. Most economists would today dismiss the idea immediately as another version of the naive 'lump-of-labor fallacy'. In its most basic form, this proposition holds that...

Over the last thirty years pathways to retirement have changed substantially in the UK. They have been dominated by spells of unemployment in the late 1970s, with then an increased importance of disability spells from the mid-1980s onwards. At the end of the period the direct route from work to...

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 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...