In 1999 the UK government made major reforms to the system of child-contingent benefits, including the introduction of Working Families' Tax Credit and an increase in means-tested Income Support for families with children. Between 1999-2003 government spending per-child on these benefits rose by...

This paper examines the impact of in utero exposure to the Asian influenza pandemic of 1957 upon physical and cognitive development in childhood. Outcome data is provided by the National Child Development Study (NCDS), a panel study of a cohort of British children who were all potentially...

Childcare costs are often viewed as one of the biggest barriers to work, particularly among lone parents on low incomes. Children in England are typically eligible to start school - and thus access a number of hours of free public education - on 1 September after they turn four. This means that...

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...

The paper estimates public sector wage differentials and their changes over time for men and women in the United Kingdom using the New Earnings Survey. It presents estimates that are robust to unobserved workforce characteristics and that also show the impact of policy changes and cyclical...

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...

Over the last two decades, the wage gap between men and women has narrowed, yet a sizeable discrepancy in earnings capacity remains between seemingly identical male and female workers. Analyses of the role of employment experience in explaining this gender wage gap have been limited by the...

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...