There is plenty of evidence across the EU to suggest that young people from poorer backgrounds are less likely to attend tertiary education than their better-off peers. This correlation is often used to justify monetary transfers to families with students. It is not clear, however, that these...

This paper examines the impact of the Working Families Tax Credit (WFTC) on employment retention and advancement. The WFTC, which replaced Family Credit in October 1999, supplemented earnings of low paid workers living in low income families. It was designed to increase the financial incentive...

Local linear fitting is a popular nonparametric method in nonlinear statistical and econometric modelling. Lu and Linton (2007) established the point wise asymptotic distribution (central limit theorem) for the local linear estimator of nonparametric regression function under the condition of...

Bajari, Benkard and Levin (2007) propose an estimation methodology for a broad class of dynamic optimization problems. To carry out their procedure, one needs to select a set of alternative policy functions and compare the implied expected payoffs with that from the data. We show that this can...

Building on previous studies on perceptions of inequality, welfare and risk we investigate the structure of individualsamp;apos' rankings of uncertain prospects in terms of risk and their relationship to individual preferences. We examine three interlinked propositions that are fundamental to...

This paper documents the convergence of incomes across Indian states over the period 1965 to 1998. It departs from traditional analyses of convergence by tracking the evolution of the entire income distribution, instead of standard regression and time series analyses. The findings reveal...

The tax-payer-as-gambler (TAG) model of tax non-compliance is the classic vehicle for providing some simple insights. Under fairly general conditions this model supports the following four propositions: (1) if the rate of return to evasion is positive everyone evades tax' (2) people with higher...

This paper documents the impact of Argentinaamp;apos's recent economic crises on different aspects of poverty, with a special focus on the economic collapse of 2002. We discuss the methodology of poverty measurement in Argentina and we use a simple rule to compensate for the lack of regional...

It is known from the literature on uncertainty that in cases where individuals express a preference for a high win-probability bet over a bet with high winnings they nevertheless will bid more to obtain the bet with high winnings. We investigate whether a similar phenomenon applies in the...

Efficient semiparametric and parametric estimates are developed for a spatial autoregressive model, containing nonstochastic explanatory variables and innovations suspected to be non-normal. The main stress is on the case of distribution of unknown, nonparametric, form, where series...