We consider the interaction between the risk of unemployment, random house prices, consumption and savings. A critical decision is that of refinancing house purchase, up to 100% mortgages are possible. There is also a fixed transaction cost of refinancing. In a CARA framework we derive the value...

Allowing for general utility interdependence and agent heterogeneity, we characterize taxes that will generate first best solutions in markets. We show the equivalence of tax corrections derived from the Marshallian and compensated demand approaches. Next we analyze the conditions that are...

The interaction between housing wealth, the financial portfolio of the consumer and consumption is a live issue. Life cycle models with closed form solutions under uncertainty are hard to find. In this paper we find analytical solutions for the effects of house price uncertainty and employment...

Guangdong is one of the fastest growing Chinese provinces and has a high level of gross migration flows. Its intra-province migration is 2.7 times higher than its inter-province migration. We study migration between the 18 prefecture-level divisions of Guangdong during 1990-1999 using annual...

The paper argues that many choice situations involve a more complicated constraint structure than the standard linear budget constraint and consumption set. Some abstract examples are outlined and in each case some theoretical properties are derived, for example, of the comparative statics. One...

US males labour force behaviour shows lifecycle effects. We develop a lifecycle model of individual labour supply, with a single financial asset and non labour income. With widely used preferences, we derive the analytical form of the value function and optimal labour participation for any...

The UK Economic and Social Research Council's Global Environmental Change (GEC) research programme aims “to take the social sciences to the heart of environmental debate and to bring the environment to the heart of the social sciences”. The experience of researchers working within the GEC...

The term ‘interactive social science’ refers to a collaborative pattern of researcher-user relationships. Interactive research has been characterised as a distinctive mode of knowledge production and contrasted to contract research. This article questions this stark distinction and considers...

This paper analyses labour force participation and precautionary savings in the presence of risks of being fired or failing to secure a job offer when out of the labour market. We use a finite horizon framework with two employment states and a stage utility function which is CARA in consumption...