Inequality

This report considers sources of bias in cost-of-living and price indices, with particular reference to the UK's retail price index. The sources of bias discussed are caused by the introduction of new goods, quality change in existing goods and commodity substitution by consumers. New methods of quantifying these biases and correcting them are presented with empirical applications.

Significant change was made to both tax and benefits systems during the period 19972001.

This paper uses revealed preference restrictions and nonparametric statistical methods to bound a quality-constant price series for a good that

In this article we argue that the life-cycle model that allows demographics to affect household preferences and relaxes the assumption of certainty equivalence can generate hump-shaped consumption profiles over age that are very similar to those observed in household-level data sources.

This paper presents an hedonic model of the price of a sample of new cars available in the UK during the period 1986 to 1995.

The question of how inequality is generated and how it reproduces over time has been a major concern for social scientists for more than a century.

The first half of the report sheds some new light on the following questions with a detailed and consistent comparison of income distributions in Western Germany and the UK from 1984 to 1992. To what extent was the income distribution in Western Germany similar to the UK in 1984? Did the inequality of West German incomes rise to the same extent? What was the differing role of the labour market, the tax and benefit system and demographic change in each country? The second half of the report concentrates on whether and how education, training and wage setting systems together with other institutional factors in Western Germany can explain the differences relative to the more deregulated UK labour market.

This paper places the debate over using consumption or income in studies of inequality growth in a formal intertemporal setting. It highlights the importance of permanent and transitory income uncertainty in the evaluation of growth in consumption inequality.

This paper uses microeconomic data from the UK Family Expenditure Surveys (FES) and the General Household Surveys (GHS) to describe and explain changes in the distribution of male wages.

This book presents the results of the analysis discussed at a conference in July 1996 for users and providers of Family Expenditure Survey Data

In this Commentary, the authors look at the likely effects that real year-by-year increases in road fuel duties will have on the use of cars by households and on their economic welfare, with particular attention to the distributional consequences.

The life-cycle hypothesis predicts that the cross-sectional variance of the marginal utility of consumption is equal to its own lag plus a constant and a random component.

In this paper we show how estimates of aggregate spending in the UK would be affected by using grossing weights that take account of the known dimensions of non-representativeness of the Family Expenditure Survey.

Methods of testing econometrically for horizontal inequity (HI) induced by tax systems are examined.

A common feature of federal systems is that tax bases are joint property.

This research is concerned with the demand for lottery tickets and uses data for the UK National Lottery that records the behaviour, incomes and characteristics of almost 10,000 individuals.

Smoothed estimates of the complex relationships between age and intakes of energy, fat, calcium and vitamin C are obtained for males and females from British National Food Survey data covering the period 197494.