The modern life cycle theory of consumption predicts dissaving of assets during retirement. But evidence suggests that dissaving occurs at a relatively slow rate, so that many households bequeath assets. Evidence from the Retirement Survey in Britain suggests that the portfolio of bequeathable...

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<p>1. The rate of VAT has been cut temporarily to 15%, with a return to 17.5% in place for the end of 2009. The government has predicted that this will increase consumer spending by about 0.5%. Much of the analysis of this tax cut has been critical of the policy and concluded that the government's...</p>

A rich array of institutional diversity makes the United States an excellent place to study the relationship between political institutions and public policy outcomes. This essay has three main aims. First, it reviews existing empirical evidence on the relationship between institutional rules,...

We extend the collective model of household behavior to allow for the existence of public consumption. Under a separability assumption, we show that the observation of the labor supplies and the household demand for the public good allow to identify preferences and the decision process up to...

This paper examines the response of industries and firms to changes in trade costs. Several new firm-level models of international trade with heterogeneous firms predict that industry productivity will rise as trade costs fall due to the reallocation of activity across plants within an industry....

In 2007 and 2008 Polish governments introduced a series of reforms which led to a substantial reduction in the tax "wedge" (in Polish: "klin") on labour. The mean ATR on total labour cost was reduced from 41.6% to 34.0%. We show that when considered together the package of introduced reforms...

The New Deal For Young People is the major welfare-to-work program in the UK. It is a mandatory multistage policy targeted at the 18-24 year old unemployed. This paper investigates the effectiveness of the program in terms of enhancing the (re)employment probability of participant males. I...

This paper uses a structural model to address the question of why home-owners with large mortgage debt work longer hours than those without such debt. We consider whether this is due to lower net wealth or to capital market imperfections, including mortgage constraints that depend on current...