Taxation data have been used to create long-run series for the distribution of top incomes in quite a number of countries. Most of these studies have focused on the national experience of individual countries, but we can also learn from cross-country comparisons. Comparative analysis is...

This paper presents an analysis of housing conditions amongst the British urban working class in 1904, using a re-discovered survey. We investigate overcrowding and we find major regional differences. Scottish households were more overcrowded despite being less poor. Investigating the causes of...

We study the extent of overcrowding amongst British urban working families in the early 1900s and find major regional differences. In particular, a much greater proportion of households in urban Scotland were overcrowded than in the rest of Britain and Ireland. We investigate the causes of this...

On almost all measures of physical health, Scots fare worse than residents of any other region of the UK and often worse than the rest of Europe. Deaths from chronic liver disease and lung cancer are particularly prevalent in Scotland. The self-assessed wellbeing of Scots is lower than that of...

The data described in this paper come from a unique cross section study collected by the author, using a postal questionnaire, of five Scottish Universities: Aberdeen, Dundee, Glasgow, Heriot-Watt and St. Andrews undertaken in 1995/6. It encompasses detailed information on the personal and...

The academic profession is an occupation in which pay has fallen dramatically, resulting in the setting up of a Committee of Inquiry to examine both pay relativities and mechanisms for pay determination. This paper considers salary determination and the gender salary gap in the academic labour...

This paper examines the hypothesis that the gender salary gap observed in the academic labour market is predominantly explained by the differing average characteristics of male and female academics and barriers to female promotion. Preliminary analysis reveals that the crowding of women into the...

Not only the level of aggregate unemployment but also the properties of its dynamics are an important topic in macroeconomics and labor economics. Several models like e.g. matching models with endogenous job destruction explicitly predict an asymmetric pattern in the evolution of unemployment,...

Why are there such large differences in living arrangements across Western European countries? Conventional economic analyses have not been successful in explaining differences in living arrangements and particularly the dramatic increase in the fraction of young adults living with their parents...

Looking across many diseases, average health among mature men is much worse in America compared to England. Second, there exists a steep negative health gradient for men in both countries where men at the bottom of the economic hierarchy are in much worse health than those at the top. This...