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...

Over the past 20 years the incidence of relative poverty among Britain's children has tripled. These changes are related to increased earnings inequality, growth in the number of single (lone) parent households, and an increased share of households with children with no working adult. The Labour...

Does money matter? When investigating health behaviour, research often finds a strong positive association between income and healthy behaviour. This could however be due to individual characteristics that determine both income and health investment and is not necessarily due to the role of...

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...

The principal of horizontal equity can be interpreted as requiring that households with the same pre-transfer incomes and the same consumption needs should receive the same post-transfer incomes. We argue the generosity of government financial support to families with children should be analysed...

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...

The goals of income transfer systems in the US and the UK for low-income families are to reduce poverty and welfare dependency and encourage work. Both the US and UK have made in-work benefits a key part of their strategy through the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Working Families' Tax...

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...