Family Credit and ist successor the WFTC, have been central to the British welfare reform debate in reacent years. This debate in informed by tax benefit modelling, yet accurate modelling of Family Credit is fraught with potential problems. The main model input data are found to under-sample...

In this paper, we identify methodological differences and similarities in the measurement of wealth using survey data constructed for different purposes in the United Kingdom and England. The focus of the paper is on two prominent surveys in the UK: the English Longitudinal Survey of Ageing4...

The paper estimates public sector wage differentials and their changes over time for men and women in the United Kingdom using the New Earnings Survey. It presents estimates that are robust to unobserved workforce characteristics and that also show the impact of policy changes and cyclical...

In this paper we investigate the size of health differences that exist among men in England and the United States and how those differences vary by Socio-Economic Status (SES) in both countries. Three SES measures are emphasized - education, household income, and household wealth - and the...

This study uses the first twelve waves of the British Household Panel Survey covering the period 1991-2002 to investigate the extent of constraints on desired hours of work within jobs and the degree of flexibility of the labour market for a sample of women. Our main findings are as follows....

This paper tests the published section level price and weight dataused in the compilation of the UK Retail Prices Index for consistencywith the theory of the cost-of-living index. We use a nonparametric testof theoretical consistency and bootstrap statistical methods to estimatethe probability...

This paper investigates the relationship between product market competition (PMC) and innovation. A Schumpeterian growth model is developed in which firms innovate ѳtep-by-stepҬ and where both technological leaders and their followers engage in R&D activities. In this model, competition...

It is standard in the literature on training to use wages as a sufficient statistic for productivity. This paper examines the effects of work-related training on direct measures of productivity. Using a new panel of British industries 1983-1996 and a variety of estimation techniques we find that...

Recent attention has focused on the UK's productivity gap in the retail sector. Figure 1 shows an estimate of labour productivity in retail across countries, using output per hour worked. The UK lies well behind the US, France and Germany. Reynolds at al (2005) contribute to this debate by...

This paper develops a new approach to studying how electoral bias in favor of one party due to the pattern of districting affects policy choice. We tie a commonly used measure of bias to the theory of party compe- tition and show how this affects policy choice. The usefulness of the approach is...