This paper uses National Child Development Study data for a large cohort of British individuals, to explore the influence of education, inheritance and other background characteristics on the propensity to become self-employed; and also on subsequent success, as measured by job and wealth...

The paper makes three contributions to the economics literature on entrepreneurship. We offer a new measure of entrepreneurship which accounts for variations in persistence in self-employment. We outline an econometric methodology to account for this approach and find that it is superior to...

Using decomposition analysis, the paper investigates the reasons why Northern England has less but higher performing self-employed businesses than the South. It finds the causes are mainly structural differences rather than due to regional variation in people's characteristics. The paper also...

In a simple 2-period model of relative income under uncertainty, higher comparison income for the younger cohort can signal higher or lower expected lifetime relative income, and hence either increase or decrease well-being. With data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and the British...

This paper combines collective bargaining over wages and working time with models of endogenous and neoclassical growth. Public expenditure is funded by taxes on capital and labour supplied by infinitely-lived households in a closed economy. Taxes on labour are generally inefficient in both...

In contrast to previous results combining all ages we find positive effects of comparison income on happiness for the under 45s, and negative effects for those over 45. In the BHPS these coefficients are several times the magnitude of own income effects. In GSOEP they cancel to give no effect of...