This paper examines the motivation for intergenerational transfers between adult children and their parents, and the nature of preferences for such giving behaviour, in an experimental setting. Participants in our experiment play a series of dictator games with parents and strangers, in which we...

This paper investigates individuals' expectations about their own survival to older ages and compares patterns in average responses about survival chances with actual and projected survival rates. The extent to which individuals have, on average, accurate expectations about survival to older...

The "annuity puzzle" refers to the fact that annuities are rarely purchased despite the longevity insurance they provide. Most explanations for this puzzle assume that individuals have accurate expectations about their future survival. We provide evidence that individuals mis-perceive their...

We exploit the change to the minimum school-leaving age in the United Kingdom from 14 to 15 using a regression discontinuity design to evaluate the causal effect of one more year of education on cognitive abilities at older ages. We find a large and significant effect of this reform on males'...

Disability benefits provide social insurance against the risk of losing working capacity, as well as an important source of income for individuals with disabilities. They are also costly and tend to reduce labor supply. Although spending can be contained by careful targeting, correcting past...

Significant departures from log normality are observed in income data, in violation of Gibrat’s law. We identify a new empirical regularity, which is that the distribution of consumption expenditures across households is, within cohorts, closer to log normal than the distribution of income. We...

We estimate a collective household model with survey data on financial satisfaction from the European Community Household Panel. Our estimates suggest that cohabitating individuals enjoy returns to scale in consumption that are towards the larger end of the range of estimates reported in the...

In this paper we model the changing distribution of household spending in the UK over the period 1978 to 1999 and explore the interpretation of remaining time trends in spending once changes in other observed covariates have been accounted for.