This paper characterizes the nature of poverty from a dynamic life-cycle perspective. Using panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we find that 40% of young Americans experienced at least one year of poverty, and most of these experienced one or two years. A significant...

Payer-driven competition has been widely advocated as a means of increasing efficiency in health care markets. The 1990s reforms to the UK health service followed this path. We examine whether competition led to better outcomes for patients, as measured by death rates after treatment following...

We investigate the importance of economic factors in young Americans’ decisions to form and dissolve households. We adopt a search theoretic framework to analyse the decisions to: leave the parental home; form a marriage or partnership; and dissolve a marriage or partnership. We focus, in...

This review examines the performance of the UK healthcare system. After presenting data on the level and distribution of resources, three topics are examined. The first is the lessons from international comparisons of evidence on expenditure, equity and healthcare outcomes. The second is the...

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It is widely accepted proposition that one of the aims of the UK National Health Service is to allocate health care on the basis of need. However, while there may be considerable consensus over the legitimacy of this goal, there is also considerable debate as to whether the goal has been met. If...

This paper presents the results of a detailed survey designed to explore the factors associated with purchase of private health insurance in England. The survey, a nationally representative survey of the population of England aged 25 to 70, was carried out in the first 4 months of 1987. The...

The length of waiting lists for treatment in the British National Health Service is an issue of current political and economic concern. This paper presents estimates of the costs to consumers of waiting lists for non-urgent medical care. The estimates are derived from data collected using...

Using a unique data set, we present evidence on income trajectories of people living in micro-neighbourhoods. We investigate neighbourhood influences making as few parametric assumptions as possible. The article offers a number of advances. We exploit a data set that is large, representative,...

Labor market regulation can have harmful unintended consequences. In many markets, especially for public sector workers, pay is regulated to be the same for individuals across heterogeneous geographical labor markets. We would predict that this will mean labor supply problems and potential falls...