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This article studies the determinants of partnership dissolution and focuses on the role of child support. We exploit the variation in child support liabilities and entitlements driven, in part, by the introduction of a new set of complex rules that determined child support liability in the UK, and by their interaction with welfare rules. Our panel has the virtue that the post 1993 variation in child support liability for all couples in partnerships formed prior to 1993 is unanticipated. We find strong evidence that the resulting large child support liabilities significantly reduced dissolution risks.

This paper outlines the issues relevant to the design of pari-mutuel lottery games and makes inferences about game design effects from estimates of how rollovers affect sales. Lottery tickets sales depend positively on the proportion of revenue returned as prizes, positively on the skewness of the prize distribution (which depends largely on how much of the prize money goes to the jackpot), and negatively on the variance in the prize distribution (which depends largely on how much goes on smaller prizes). We simulate the effects of envisaged game design changes on sales revenue and find potentially large effects.

In-work transfer schemes have recently been suggested as a device for encouraging labour force participation and reducing the severity of the disincentives associated with out-of-work income support schemes. Here we estimate a discrete choice labour supply model which allows for endogenous in-work welfare programme participation. We also allow for involuntary unemployment so as to distinguish between programme non-participation and an inability to obtain work and thereby generate an eligibility to the programme.

In-work transfer schemes have recently been suggested as a device for encouraging labor force participation and reducing the severity of the disincentives associated with out-of-work income support schemes. Here the authors estimate a discrete choice labor supply model which allows for endogenous in-work welfare program participation. They also allow for involuntary unemployment so as to distinguish between program nonparticipation and an inability to obtain work and thereby generate an eligibility to the program. Copyright 1997 by Royal Economic Society.

Empirical investigations into the expenditure and time allocation decisions of households usually allow the variation in demographic characteristics across households, in particular the number and ages of dependent children, to affect these decisions. The motivation for allowing such demographic effects is two-fold. First, it permits the researcher to pool observations from households with differing demographic characteristics. Secondly, it has been argued that it allows the researcher to construct an index, normally called an equivalence scale, to show the (full) income required by a household with some given composition to attain the same level of utility as some reference household, and hence permits comparisons of welfare levels across households. There are two areas of controversy surrounding this literature which directly relate to its two sources of motivation. First, what is the appropriate demographic specification? Second, can the estimated parameters be used to undertake welfare comparisons? A series of demand studies, including Barten (1964), Blundell (1980), Blundell and Walker (1982), Gorman (1976), Muellbauer (1974, 1977), Hurd and Pencavel (1981), Pollak and Wales (1978, 1981), and Ray (1983), have attempted to answer the first problem by considering the current allocation of goods, and in some cases household time, conditional on demographic structure. This literature treats demographic variables as exogenous whereas, in contrast, the neoclassical fertility literature (see for example the contributions in Schultz (1973)) treats the numbers and ages of children as endogenous nonmarket goods within a lifecycle optimising framework. The second problem has been raised by Pollak and Wales (1979) who argue convincingly, whether household composition is the result of endogenous decisions or not, it is impossible to compare the welfare of households with different compositions using the results of empirical demand analysis since market decisions do not reveal how the households feel about the presence or absence of children. Thus estimated equivalence scales are necessarily based on the households' preferences conditional on their demographic compositions. The object of this paper is to suggest a new approach to the problem of demographic specification and to show that this approach both highlights the problem of making welfare comparisons and, at least in part, resolves it.

Official estimates of housing benefit take-up rates suggest that up to two million families in the United Kingdom ma y not be receiving the help with their housing costs to which they ar e entitled. The authors' interest in the take-up of means tested bene fits is therefore motivated by two concerns. The first is the governm ent revenue implications of a change to benefit entitlement levels. T he second relates to the welfare of individuals who fail to claim the ir entitlement to benefit. In this paper, the authors investigate the relationship between the take-up of means-tested housing benefit, in dividual socioeconomic characteristics, and the level of entitlement. Copyright 1987 by Royal Economic Society.

In addition to choosing the allocation of total expenditure between commodities, households may also be able to make decisions over the allocation of their time between market work and leisure. In both theoretical and empirical work it has often been the case that these decisions have been analysed separately. In this paper we stress the theoretical attractions of considering the joint determination of the allocation of time between work and leisure and the allocation of total expenditure between commodities in a utility maximising framework. Using a sample of individual households we attempt to evaluate the empirical importance of the joint determination model over the separate determination of labour supplies and commodity demands. Our approach follows that of Abbott and Ashenfelter (I976), Phlips (I978), Barnett (I979), Deaton and Muellbauer (I980), and Atkinson and Stern (I980). Here we pay particular attention to the following four important aspects of household decision-making over commodity demand and labour supply. The first concerns the commonly assumed restriction on the household's preferences of (weak) separability between goods and leisure. This assumption allows the estimation of commodity demand systems and Engel curves that exclude wage-rate variables. In cross-section household budget data with large variation in wage rates across the sample the invalidity of this assumption would involve a serious mis-specification. Any correlation between the excluded wage variable and the included price, income and demographic variables would lead to biased parameter estimates and hence biased estimated elasticities. Similarly, this assumption allows the estimation of labour supply curves that exclude relative price variables and its invalidity could produce biased labour supply elasticities. A second aspect of household decision-making which we wish to highlight arises from the suspicion, commonly alluded to in labour economics texts, that primary male workers may not be free to choose their hours of work. Thus we estimate a matched pair of rationed and unrationed systems following the work of Neary and Roberts (i 980) and Deaton and Muellbauer (I 979). The separability restriction is not unrelated to this point, since without it we will see that the rationed hours of work enter demand systems in a complex fashion. In effect