Models-in-the-minds about the proper and right way to be a true friend or to do family behaviour may not necessarily fit lived experience, especially in cases where relationships become fused and distinctions between family and friend become blurred.. We suggest the idea of a personal community the micro-social world of significant others for any given individual as a practical schema for capturing the set of relationships in which people are actually embedded. 2010-01 2010-01-31 We analyse FRS survey data on the relationship between disability and receipt of the Attendance Allowance (AA) disability benefit by older people. Despite being non-means-tested, we find that AA is implicitly income-targeted and strongly targeted on those with care needs. We focus particularly on the receipt of higher-rate benefit, intended for those in need of day-and-night care, finding that, in practice, higher-rate payments are negatively related to age and income, in addition to care needs. The allocation of higher-rate AA awards strongly favours people with physical rather than cognitive disabilities. 2010-02 2010-01-25 This paper provides a contemporary account of inequalities in pay of disabled people and those from selected minority ethno-religious groups. We aim to understand the causes for differences in pay by ethno-religious group and disability status and type. We investigate whether pay gaps are a consequence of individual earning potential as represented, for example, by educational qualifications, or whether they appear to stem from the particular occupations or types of occupation that the minority groups are concentrated into; or whether they are largely unaccounted for. In the case of remaining unexplained gaps in pay, we consider how far they might provide evidence of employer discrimination. 2009-31 2009-12-09 A modelling framework is developed for describing income-age trajectories that is useful for summarizing not only the average profile for a group of individuals with similar characteristics, but also how individual trajectories differ from the group average. Using data from waves 1-17 of the British Household Panel Survey, the model is estimated separately for twelve groups of individuals differentiated in terms of educational qualifications, birth cohort and sex. The results indicate significant differences in the shapes of average trajectories across groups, and substantial variations in trajectories across individuals within groups. 2009-30 2009-12-09 This paper analyses the relationship between deprivation, income and other individual dimensions over time, in eleven European countries, exploiting the longitudinal nature of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). First, the determinants of deprivation are analysed by using fixed effects models for each country separately. Second a decomposition of the deprivation gaps between countries highlights the reasons for the differentials across Europe. The results show that changes in income and deprivation do not strictly coincide. In countries where deprivation is higher, income is more effective in reducing the deprivation differential but the family structure contributes to determine such a gap. 2009-34 2009-12-08 The treatment of housing in the definition of income used to measure poverty makes a big difference to who is counted as poor. Both the Before Housing Costs (BHC) and After Housing Costs (AHC) measures in current use in the UK pose problems. We compare BHC and AHC income with an alternative measure, overcoming their respective flaws by including in income the difference between the estimated value of housing consumed and housing costs, or net imputed rent. We investigate whether findings about poverty among children and pensioners, and the effectiveness of poverty-reducing policies, are affected by accounting for housing in this way. 2009-33 2009-11-25 We suggest the use of an Internet job-search indicator (the Google Index, GI) as the best leading indicator to predict the US unemployment rate. We perform a deep out-of-sample forecasting comparison analyzing many models that adopt both our preferred leading indicator (GI), the more standard initial claims or combinations of both. We find that models augmented with the GI outperform the traditional ones in predicting the monthly unemployment rate, even in most state-level forecasts and in comparison with the Survey of Professional Forecasters. 2009-32 2009-11-18 We analyze the dynamics of social assistance benefit (SA) receipt among working-age adults in Britain between 1991 and 2005. The decline in the annual SA receipt rate was driven by a decline in the SA entry rate, rather than by the SA exit rate (which actually declined too). We examine the determinants of these trends using a multivariate dynamic random effects probit model of SA entry and exit probabilities applied to British Household Panel Survey data. The model estimates and accompanying counterfactual simulations highlight the importance of two factors – the decline in the unemployment rate over the period, and other changes in the socioeconomic environment including two reforms to the income maintenance system in the 1990s. The results also reveal a substantial heterogeneity in SA annual transition rates. 2009-29 2009-09-22 Neighbourhood characteristics affect the social and economic opportunities of their residents. While a number of studies have analysed housing adjustments at different life stages, little is known about neighbourhood quality adjustments. Based on a model of optimal housing consumption we analyse the determinants of residential mobility and the neighbourhood quality adjustments made by those who move, drawing on data from the British Household Panel Survey and Indices of Multiple Deprivation. We measure neighbourhood quality both subjectively and objectively and find that not all life-course events that trigger moves lead to neighbourhood quality adjustments. Single people are negatively affected by leaving the parental home and couples by a husband’s unemployment. Couples having a new baby move into better neighbourhoods. 2009-28 2009-09-17 Although the majority of research on US income inequality trends is based on public-use March CPS data, a new wave of research using IRS tax return data reports substantially higher levels of inequality and faster growing trends. We show that these apparently inconsistent estimates are largely reconciled if the inequality measure and the income distribution are defined in the same way. Using internal CPS data for 1967–2006, we closely match IRS data-based estimates of top income shares reported by Piketty and Saez (2003). Our results imply that any inequality increases since 1993 are concentrated among the top 1 percent of the distribution. 2009-27 2009-09-14 This paper considers new 'distributionally sensitive' summary measures of wage differentials, not solely determined by "the average wage of the average person" but by differences across complete wage distributions. Considerations of risk or inequality aversion in the assessment of wage differentials are explicitly included, transplanting expected utility concepts familiar to income distribution analysts. In an application to the gender pay gap in Luxembourg the disadvantage of women persists with the new generalized measures of wage differentials. This suggests that lower average wages for women are not compensated by less dispersed distributions. The paper also illustrates original estimation of wage distributions in the presence of covariates and under endogenous labour market participation. 2009-26 2009-09-04 We provide evidence that living with an unmarried mother during childhood raises smoking propensities for young adults in Germany. 2009-25 2009-09-04 We suggest a new comprehensive measure of support given through tax-benefit systems to families with children. Using microsimulation techniques, this accounts for all provisions contingent on the presence of children, while usually only gross child/family benefits are considered. We use EUROMOD, the European Union tax-benefit microsimulation model, to quantify the support for children and analyse its impact on household incomes and child poverty for 19 countries. We find that the conventional approach underestimates on average the total amount of support for children by about one fifth. Furthermore, the differences between two measures vary considerably across countries and are, therefore, critical for cross-national comparisons. 2009-24 2009-09-04 There has been much commentary on the likely consequences of the current recession for the living standards of British households. This article aims to contribute to the live debate about the current recession in the UK by analysing the impact of the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s on nonemployment patterns among people in the main range of working ages and the possible consequences if the effects observed in earlier business cycles were to be repeated now. The article uses a series of General Household Surveys over a 32 year period to show, first, the impact of cyclical factors on overall patterns of non-employment (including mothers and disabled people, as well as the unemployed), and second, which social groups are most affected. A key question is whether types of people who are already disadvantaged are especially sensitive to a downturn. 2009-23 2009-08-21 Using the British Household Panel Survey we examine how the Big Five personality traits - openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism - affect wages. We estimate mean and quantile pay gaps between people with low and high levels of each of the Big Five, and decompose these pay gaps in the part explained by differences in workers' characteristics and in the residual unexplained part. We find that openness to experience is the most relevant personality trait followed by neuroticism, agreeableness and extroversion. Openness and extroversion are rewarded while agreeableness and neuroticism are penalized. 2009-22 2009-08-04 To minimise nonresponse bias most large-scale social surveys undertake nonresponse weighting. Traditional nonresponse weights adjust for demographic information only. This paper assesses the effect and added value of weights based on fieldwork process data in the European Social Survey (ESS). The reduction of relative nonresponse bias in estimates of political activism, trust, happiness and human values was examined. The effects of process, frame and post-stratification weights, as well as of weights combining several data sources, were examined. The findings demonstrate that process weights add explanatory power to nonresponse bias adjustments. Combined demographic and process weights were most successful at removing nonresponse bias. 2009-21 2009-07-27 This paper analyses the impact that local labour market conditions have on entry wages of highly educated workers in Great Britain and Finland. In both countries, workers entering the labour market in regions with (or periods of) tighter job competition obtain lower wages. Competition from employed job seekers has a negative impact on entry wages in both countries, while competition from unemployed job seekers has a negative impact only in Finland. Overall, the wage elasticity is larger in Great Britain than in Finland, suggesting that centralised collective bargaining might mitigate the impact that local labour market conditions have on entry wages. 2009-20 2009-07-06 We investigate the processes underlying payment of Attendance Allowance (AA) in the older UK population, using a partial identification approach. Receipt of AA requires that (i) a claim is made and (ii) programme administrators assess the claim as warranting an award. These processes cannot be analysed directly because we observe neither potentially successful unpursued claims, nor rejected claims. Combining survey data with weak prior restrictions and aggregate information on claim success rates, we are able to distinguish clearly the behaviour of potential claimants and assessors. Results suggest that there are many potentially successful AA claims which are not pursued. 2009-19 2009-06-25 This paper uses the New Zealand Linked Income Supplement (LIS) to investigate the annual transitions in hourly earnings of working age individuals over the years 1997 to 2004. I first construct transition matrices for annual changes in weekly and hourly earnings, to enable comparison with previous analyses using New Zealand tax data. I then estimate the determinants of annual changes in hourly earnings using OLS and quantile regressions. Differences in human capital are associated with differences in the rate of earnings growth. The results were broadly similar across the sub-periods 1997-2001 and 2001-2004. 2009-18 2009-06-11 The study examines how the job competition among the highly educated affects their wages in regional labour markets. We estimate individual-level wage curves separately for graduates and post-graduates and divide the job competition in unemployed and employed job search by level of education. The study does not find a wage curve for the highly educated in Finland. The results indicate that the dynamics of the market apparent in the increased employed job search creates more job opportunities for the graduates in the private sector, while declining the opportunities of both the graduates and the postgraduates in the municipality sector. 2009-17 2009-06-11 In this paper we explore the impact of birth weight on children's cognitive and behavioural outcomes using data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study. In order to deal with the endogeneity of birth weight we propose an eliminant estimator, which exploits the availability of multiple outcomes for the same individual at the same point in time. The results show that birth weight has significant but very small effects on male cognitive development at age 3 and on female cognitive and behavioural outcomes at age 3. We also find that birth weight affects age 5 outcomes only through previous achievements, and that the overall impact fades out over time. These findings call into question the effectiveness of birth weight as a policy target. 2009-16 2009-05-14 This research examines the strength of people's ties with close neighbours and the sensitivity thereof to changes in residential mobility, access to modes of public and private transport, and changes in the availability of modern communications technologies using the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP). All forms of mobility have increased over time and are negatively associated with visiting neighbours. With further increases in mobility, close neighbours may become less relevant. Nevertheless, presently the incidence of visits with neighbours is sizeable; in contrast to the frequent assertion in the literature that the neighbourhood is of no importance. 2009-15 2009-04-17 This paper compares earnings data from the British Household Panel Survey with those collected in the Family Resources Survey, using several measures, which account for various key aspects of the two surveys, and 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 first perform non-parametric tests of equality at the centre of the distributions and over the whole earnings distributions. We then apply multivariate regression methods to establish whether the FRS and BHPS earnings data yield different results in relation to three typical uses of earnings data: the probability of being at the bottom or at the top of the earnings distribution, the estimation of earnings functions and, using earnings as an explanatory variable, the probability of belonging to an occupational pension plan. Most of our analyses reveal that the two surveys have fairly similar earnings data in the first comparison year, while sizable differences emerge in the later comparison. This finding is generally robust to the use of alternative earnings definitions and to the type of analysis performed, and thus suggests the important role played by attrition and ‘vintage’ effects. 2009-14 2009-04-01 We analyse the nature of interindustry wage differentials using Portuguese data. Estimates from models controlling for observed worker and firm characteristics reveal significant and persistent raw interindustry differentials, which questions the competitive model of the labour market. However, estimates controlling for unobserved worker heterogeneity suggest that the raw differentials are due to the concentration of high wage workers in certain industries and not to genuine differences in compensation across industries. However, a complete decomposition shows that (i) firm effects on average explain 70% of the industry wage premia, and (ii) genuine and sizeable interindustry wage differentials exist. These differentials are shown to increase the time to separation from firms, and are therefore compatible with the competitive model. 2009-13 2009-03-31 We investigate the returns to promotions and separations from firms using Portuguese linked employer-employee data. More than 90% of the total variation in wages can be ex- plained by observed and unobserved characteristics of workers and firms. Taken together, worker and firm unobserved effects explain more than half of the variation of wages for all types of job mobility. Our results suggest that promoted workers are high wage workers in high wage firms. Movers are inherently lower wage workers, in lower wage firms. However, on average, workers that find a new job within one year enter firms that pay higher wages. This is not true for workers that take more than a year to find a new job. 2009-12 2009-03-31 This paper identifies and compares the determinants of within- and between-firm job mobility in Portugal. Estimates are based on models that distinguish promotions by whether or not they involve a change in the tasks performed, and separations by the time workers take to enter a new firm. Both worker and firm observed characteristics emerge as important factors in the analysis. Firm unobserved heterogeneity is relevant, evidence suggests that firms vary more in their unobserved propensity to promote than in the case of separations. Overall, this study highlights two main issues; the role of firms in the process of job mobility, and the importance of distinguishing not only between types of separations from firms, but also between types of promotions within firms. 2009-11 2009-03-31 We use British and German panel data to analyse job changes involving a change in occupation. We assess the extent of occupational change, taking into account the possibility of measurement error in occupational codes; whether job changes within the occupation differ from occupation changes in terms of the characteristics of those making such switches; and the effects of the two kinds of moves in terms of wages and job satisfaction. We find that occupation changes differ from other job changes, generally reflecting a less satisfactory employment situation, but also that the move in both cases is positive in respect of change in wages and job satisfaction. 2009-10 2009-03-27 We examine how dependent interviewing affects verbal interaction between interviewers and respondents in questions obtaining current employment details in the British Household Panel Study. Respondents experience few cognition problems when answering DI questions, but interruption and elaboration are likely at PDI questions. These behaviours occur when respondent circumstances have changed. Departures from standardised interviewing are also likely when circumstances change. DI seems to reduce the accuracy of detail about such change since we observe interviewer behaviour that others find to produce inaccurate data. Nevertheless, these results may explain why DI reduces the odds of spurious change between waves of panels. 2009-09 2009-03-27 In the European Social Survey (ESS) contact rates differ across countries. These differences are broadly due to (1) differences in survey implementation, (2) differences in population characteristics associated with contact propensity and (3) differences in the association between 1 or 2 and contact propensity. This paper investigates correlates of contact within and across ESS countries by decomposing cross-country differences in predicted mean contact propensities into (population and fieldwork) characteristics effects, coefficients effects and a pseudo-interaction effect. The findings shed light on the cross-national comparability of the manipulable aspects of the contacting process. In addition, we distinguish factors explaining withincountry contact propensity from factors explaining cross-country differences. 2009-08 2009-03-13 This paper evaluates the impact of dependent interviewing (DI) on interviewer burden and data quality using qualitative data collected from a survey carried out in 2006 on the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) interviewers. We find that: (i) DI has a minor effect on interviewer burden, (ii) this effect is perceived by interviewers to be positive, (iii) the mechanisms by which DI reduces interviewer burden are mainly indirect as they are mediated by respondents, and (iv) in most cases the effects of DI on interviewer burden varies in relation to the type of DI questions asked and respondent circumstances. 2009-07 2009-03-12 Social security benefits designed to meet the extra costs faced by disabled people have been in place since the early 1970s, and currently cost nearly £15 billion per year. Over the period the benefits have enjoyed bilateral political support, and the only major changes (eg in 1992) have been to extend entitlement and increase expenditure. But remarkably little is known about the impact of these benefits – exactly what difference they make to claimants’ care and mobility arrangements, to their overall standard of living, and to their social inclusion and sense of identity. The Department for Work and Pensions is considering how to study the impact of disability benefits in more depth. The Department has commissioned this feasibility study, to summarise the questions and assess alternative research approaches, with a view to launching more detailed investigations. 2009-06 2009-03-03 In this paper we consider the relationship between levels of judicial review litigation and the quality of local government services. The findings indicate that judicial review may be making a positive contribution to local government in England and Wales. The paper also considers the way local government officials perceive judicial review and argues that reactions cannot be wholly understood in terms of incentives. Judicial review makes a positive contribution to public administration at least partly because it promotes values that are central to the ethos of public administration and assists officials in resolving tensions between individual and collective justice. 2009-05 2009-02-26 To measure income inequality with right censored (topcoded) data, we propose multiple imputation for censored observations using draws from Generalized Beta of the Second Kind distributions to provide partially synthetic datasets analyzed using complete data methods. Estimation and inference uses Reiter’s (Survey Methodology 2003) formulae. Using Current Population Survey (CPS) internal data, we find few statistically significant differences in income inequality for pairs of years between 1995 and 2004. We also show that using CPS public use data with cell mean imputations may lead to incorrect inferences about inequality differences. Multiply-imputed public use data provide an intermediate solution. 2009-04 2009-02-09