Gauthier Lanot

The Relative Effect of Family Characteristics and Financial Situation on Educational Achievement

Children from poorer backgrounds are generally observed to have lower educational outcomes than other youth. However, the mechanism through which household income affects the childs outcomes remains unclear. Either, poorer families are financially constrained or some characteristics of the family make the children less likely to participate in post-compulsory education. We propose a methodology that separates financial and familial effects. As in previous studies, we find that pupils from poorer families are less likely to invest in education. However, a financial transfer would not lead to a significant increase in schooling investment, which supports the view that the family characteristic effects dominate the financial constraint effects.

The Demand for Lotto: The Role of Conscious Selection

This article presents estimates of the elasticity of demand for lottery tickets using time series data in which there is variation in the expected value of a lottery ticket induced by rollovers. An important feature of our data is that there are far more rollovers than expected given the lottery design. We find strong evidence that individuals do not choose their lottery numbers uniformly from a uniform distribution—that is, conscious selection. We use our estimates to derive the inverse supply function for the industry, and this enables us to identify the demand elasticity. We find the price elasticity to be close to unity, which implies that the operator is revenue maximizing—which is the regulators objective.

Who really wants to be a millionaire? : estimates of risk aversion from gameshow data

This paper analyses the behaviour of contestants in one of the most popular TV gameshows ever to estimate risk aversion. This gameshow has a number of features that makes it well suited for our analysis: the format is extremely straightforward, it involves no strategic decision-making, we have a large number of observations, and the prizes are cash and paid immediately, and cover a large range – from £100 up to £1 million. Our data sources have the virtue that we are able to check the representativeness of the gameshow participants. Even though the CRRA model is extremely restrictive we find that a coefficient or relative risk aversion which is close to unity fits the data across a wide range of wealth remarkably well.

The Union/Non-Union Wage Differential: an Application of Semi-Parametric Methods

Here we use a large sample of UK manual workers and compare estimates of the union wage differential obtained from a conventional Heckman two-step method of controlling for the potential endogeneity of union status with semi-parametric estimates. The semi-parametric methodology yields slope coefficients very close to Heckman two-step and least squares. That is, much of the the difference in differentials between least squares and Heckman/semi-parametric methods arises from the magnitude of the constant terms. This is the source of the large union wage differentials obtained when self-selection is taken into account. All of our attempts to control for selection generate very different constant terms from OLS so that, despite our misgivings about identification of the constants, we doubt the validity of the OLS differentials.

The Incidence of Income Tax on Wages and Labour Supply

In the simple framework of a static model for equilibrium wages and labour supplies, we show that the incidence of income tax on equilibrium wages can be measured independently from the individual ...

Child support reform and the labor supply of lone mothers in the United Kingdom

The reform of child support arrangements, including their treatment by the welfare system, has been on the policy agenda in a number of countries in recent years. This paper simulates the impact of a reform that recently has been implemented in the United Kingdom. The analysis is based on estimates of a model of discrete choice labor supply for a sample of U.K. lone mothers. We suggest that reform will induce a major reduction in welfare expenditures on lone mothers and a significant rise in their labor force participation due to greater work incentives associated with the changes.

Employer pay policies, public transfers and the retirement decisions of men and women in Denmark

The empirical retirement literature measures individual responses to variations in income flows due to public transfers, private individual or employer-provided pensions. We estimate a model accounting for the incentive effects from these sources. A dynamic structural model is extended to allow both individual and employer heterogeneity. This is applied to a Danish matched panel of workers and establishments, spanning a period of reforms to a public early retirement programme. Employer-specific compensation is found to be an important determinant of work and retirement income flows. Employer effects on retirement age are only found among sub-samples where access to public transfers is limited.

Measuring tax incidence: an application to mortgage provision in the UK

This paper derives measures of the average and marginal incidence of a tax or subsidy in imperfect competition, in the context of the UK housing market. We argue that one form of mortgage, common in the UK but not elsewhere (the endowment mortgage), exists primarily because of the structure of taxation in the UK. We estimate the determinants of the choice of the type of mortgage, and the size of mortgage conditional on the choice, using data from the Building Societies Association on 43 000 individual mortgages taken out between 1985 and 1989. The estimated parameters are an input to the incidence measures. Results suggest that between 70 and 80% of the additional subsidy to endowment mortgages is captured by lenders, rather than borrowers.

On the design of lottery games

We describe a model of participation in lottery games designed to address the optimisation of tax revenue in state-sponsored lotteries. The model treats participants dynamically and examines a long-run equilibrium. A novel high frequency approximation is used to turn the problem into a static, state-contingent deterministic programming problem. We demonstrate that the solution of this problem has qualitatively plausible properties and then calibrate the model against the United Kingdom National Lottery (UKNL). The results suggest that the current design of the UKNL may not be maximising tax revenue.

Mortgage Loan Characteristics, Unobserved Heterogeneity and the Performance of United Kingdom Securitized Subprime Loans

We estimate a competing risk model of mortgage terminations on samples of U.K. securitized subprime mortgages. Given the role of these loans in the recent financial crisis it is important to understand their performance and supposed idiosyncratic behavior. We use a flexible modelling of unobserved heterogeneity over several dimensions, controlling for selection issues involving initial mortgage choices and dynamic selection over time. We estimate the characteristics of the unobserved heterogeneity and determine the correlation between the unobserved components of default and prepayment. The paper demonstrates the need to estimate initial household choices and the durations to default or prepayment jointly.