Because individuals with HIV are more likely to fall into poverty, and the poor may be at higher risk of contracting HIV, simple estimates of the effect of HIV status on economic outcomes will tend to be biased. In this paper, we use two econometric methods based on the propensity score to...

The causal effects of fertility are a central focus in the social sciences, but the analysis is challenged by the endogeneity of fertility choices. Earlier work has proposed several “natural experiments” from twin births or gender composition of earlier births to assess whether having more...

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...

We document employment rates of older men and women in the UK over the last forty years. In both cases growth in employment since the mid 1990s has been stronger than for younger age groups. On average, older men are still less likely to be in work than they were in the mid 1970s although this...

This paper represents the first empirical application of a model of trade union behavior that has been discussed in the literature for over thirty years. The wages and employment o typographers are examined to see whether they can be usefully characterized as the outcome of a process by which...

The object of this paper is to show how population growth, through its interaction with recent technological and organizational developments, can account for many of the cross-country differences in economic outcome observed among industrialized countries over the last 20 years. In particular,...

This paper argues that rigid wages cannot provide the underpinnings of a universally valid theory of the business cycle, simply because wages are not universally rigid. Several different statistical techniques suggest that wage rates in the U.K. and Japan are between three and 15 times more...

In addition to providing useful skills, education may also yield valuable information about one's tastes and talents. This paper exploits an exogenous difference in the timing of academic specialization within the British system of higher education to test whether education provides such...

Two propositions figure prominently in explanations for Britain's comparatively low growth in employment: first, the wage-setting mechanism is insufficiently responsive to the growth of unemployment and, second, there exists a well-defined negative causal relationship from wages to employment...

Recent work on the economic effects of minimum wages has stressed that the standard economic model, where increases in minimum wages depress employment, is not supported by the empirical findings in some labour markets. In this paper we present a theoretical framework which is general enough to...