Each year, the Government decides how much to raise benefits and tax allowances. In the UK the basis for these upratings is rarely debated, yet has major long-term consequences for the relative living standards of different groups as well as for the public finances. This paper considers the...

This paper compares earnings data from the BHPS with those collected in the FRS, contrasting two different points in time (1995/96 and 2003/04), allowing us to assess the possible extent of differential attrition in the BHPS data. We perform non-parametric tests of equality at the centre of the...

Surveys differ in the way they measure satisfaction and happiness, so comparative research findings are vulnerable to distortion by survey design differences. We examine this using the British Household Panel Survey, exploiting its changes in question design and parallel use of different...

Previous studies suggest that Scandinavian countries are the ones with the highest rates of youth poverty in Europe. This somewhat unexpected finding prompts the question whether the incidence of poverty is an appropriate measure of youth disadvantage. Instead of considering poverty rates we...

We model annual low pay transition probabilities taking account of three potentially endogenous selections: two sample drop-out mechanisms (panel attrition, non-employment) and ‘initial conditions’ (base-year low pay status). This model, and variants that ignore one or more of these...