The charitable giving of UK households has changed considerably over the past 20 years. In particular, the proportion of households giving to charity fell by 5 percentage points between 1974 and 1993-94. An increase in the average size of donations meant that total voluntary income increased in real terms over the period, but, since 1988, voluntary income has stagnated. The greatest falls in the number of givers are among households in their twenties and thirties. There are clear trends in giving across households by age and income, with younger and poorer households tending to give less. But not only are today's younger households less likely to give than today's middle-aged households; they are also less likely to give than today's middle-aged households did when they were young. These generational trends in giving do not bode well for levels of voluntary income in the future.JEL classification: D12, D6.

We investigate the possibility that limited participation in asset markets, and the stock market in particular, might explain the lack of correspondence between the sample moments of the intertemporal marginal rate of substitution and asset returns in U.K. data. We estimate ownership probabilities to separate "likely" shareholders from nonshareholders, enabling us to control for changing composition effects as well as selection into the group. We then construct estimates This study has been financed under the Economic and Social Research Council Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Fiscal Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. We are also grateful for funding from the European Union under the Training and Mobility of Researchers scheme, contract ERBFMRXCT960016. Material from the Family Expenditure Survey made available by the Office for National Statistics through the Economic and Social Research Council data archive has been used by permission of the controller of Her Majesty's Stationery Office. Neither the ONS nor the ESRC data archive bears any responsibility for the analysis or interpretation of the data reported here. Thanks are due to Richard Blundell, Lucy Chennells, Lars Hansen, Costas Meghir, Annette VissingJørgensen, Guglielmo Weber, and Frank Windmeijer for useful comments and discussions. We also received useful feedback from the participants at the February 1997 TMR meeting on savings and pensions, the summer 1997 NBER workshop on consumption, and the 1997 Econometric Society European meetings and at seminars at Bristol University, Oxford University, the Inter American Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund, Institut National de las Statistique et de Etudes Economiques, the International Institute at the University of Stockholm, and the University of Warwick. The usual disclaimer applies. 772journal of political economy of the IMRS for each of these different groups and consider their time-series properties. We find that the consumption growth of shareholders is more volatile than that of nonshareholders and more highly correlated with excess returns to shares. In particular, one cannot reject the predictions of the consumption capital asset pricing model for the group of households predicted to own both assets. This is in contrast to the failure of the model when estimated on data for all households.

This paper uses data from the two waves of the UK Retirement Survey to present a detailed descriptive analysis of the retirement behaviour of older men. The main motivation for doing this is the fall in the employment rates of older men over the last 20 years. A comparison of the labour market behaviour of men with and without an occupational pension suggests that increases in the coverage and levels of occupational pensions may not be enough to explain the long‐term trends in labour market behaviour, but that there are important differences in the retirement experiences of the two groups. JEL classification: J26.

No abstract

This paper addresses the issue of whether tax revenue from alcohol lost through cross-border shopping could be recouped by cutting excise duties. This in turn depends on the elasticity of demand for alcohol.We use data from the Family Expenditure Survey 1978-96 to estimate own-and cross-price elasticities of demand for beer, wine and spirits before and after completion of the Single Market. We find no evidence of a significant change in elasticities after the Single Market. The tax rates on beer and wine are currently below their revenue-maximising rates, implying that a cut in the duty rate on beer or wine would lead to a decrease in indirect tax revenue from alcohol. We cannot reject that the current tax rate on spirits is at the revenue-maximising rate, implying that further increases in the duty on spirits are likely to cause indirect tax revenue to fall.JEL classification: H21.