We develop a new approach to modelling the impact of personal characteristics on the extent of poverty, using propensity score matching methods. This is used to evaluate the contribution of hours constraints to poverty, as revealed in UK and US datasets. The results reveal a significant...

We analyse the results of experiments on questionnaire design and interview mode in the first four waves (2008-11) of the UK Understanding Society Innovation Panel survey. The randomised experiments relate to job, health, income, leisure and overall life-satisfaction questions and vary the...

Studies have found that loneliness is as bad as smoking or obesity for mortality risk, and the prevalence of loneliness is predicted to increase with ageing populations, more people living alone, and with chronic health conditions. Despite the substantial literature on loneliness, there is...

The authors estimate a discrete-choice model of farm tenures in fifteenth-century Florence using data in the form of an unbalanced panel, with individual farms nested within landlords' total property holdings. The probabilities of wage, rental, and sharecropping tenures are estimated, allowing...

This paper uses the techniques of non-parametric density and regression estimation to estimate the Chinese age/income and age/wealth distributions, using survey data relating to 1987. Although there is evidence of a clear life-cycle profile of income earning and wealth accumulation, the results...

We analyse job grading within the UK National Health Service nursing profession, using 1994 survey data. We start from the ordered probit model, for which we develop and apply appropriate specification tests. Threshold constancy and covariate exogeneity are rejected, with important consequences...

We consider the misreporting of illicit drug use and juvenile smoking in self-report surveys and its consequences for statistical inference. Panel data containing repeated self-reports of 'lifetime' prevalence give unambiguous evidence of misreporting as 'recanting' of earlier reports of drug...

This paper examines the welfare of pensioners over the early transition period 1987-93 in Hungary. We describe the pension system in detail, and demonstrate the tendency towards compression of the pensioner income distribution towards low income which is induced by the rules and indexation...