This paper examines whether more informative job promotions carry larger wage increases. In job assignment models with asymmetric information, unexpected promotions send a signal to the external labor market to revise upward their assessment of a worker's ability. The employing firm must then...

Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, this paper assesses the in uence of personality traits on the timing of motherhood and investigates whether, and in what way, personality traits can explain the differences in maternity timing between more and less educated women. We estimate a...

This paper examines income inequality over stages of the later-life course (age 45 and older) and systems that can be used to mitigate this inequality. Two hypotheses are tested: Levels of income inequality decline during old age because public benefits are more equally distributed than work...

In this paper we evaluate the QALY loss, which may be assigned to the prevalence of specific chronic illnesses and physical handicaps. The analysis is based on an individual self-rating health satisfaction question asked in the British Household Panel Survey data set. This question provides a...

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...

Toyboy marriages (where the female partner is at least 5 years older than her male partner) have grown threefold since the 1970s in the United States and Britain. This paper examines this phenomenon using an equilibrium search framework in which becoming successful in the labour market takes...

The statistical analysis of cross-section data very often reveals a U-shaped relationship between subjective well-being and age. This paper uses fourteen waves of British panel data to distinguish between two potential explanations of this shape: a pure life-cycle or aging effect, and a fixed...

Carefully-matched pairs of written job applications were made to test for age discrimination in hiring. A twenty-one year-old and a thirty-nine year-old woman applied for jobs where a new graduate was sought; men aged twenty-seven and forty-seven, inquired about employment as waiters; women aged...

Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, this study examines the relationship between several outcomes in early adulthood (e.g., education, inactivity, earnings, and health) and being born to a teenage mother. Besides standard cross-sectional multivariate regression estimates, we also...

Does more schooling causes a delay in marriage? Using a nationwide change in the compulsory schooling law in the UK as a source of exogenous variation in education, this paper estimates the causal effect of schooling on age at first marriage. The 1947 reform, which uniquely affected about a half...