John Ermisch

Summary: We measure trust and trustworthiness in British society with a newly designed experiment using real monetary rewards and a sample of the British population. The study also asks the typical survey question that aims to measure trust, showing that it does not predict ‘trust’ as measured in the experiment. Overall, about 40% of people were willing to trust a stranger in our experiment, and their trust was rewarded half of the time. Analysis of variation in the trust behaviour in our survey suggests that trusting is more likely if people are older, their financial situation is either ‘comfortable’ or ‘difficult’ compared with ‘doing alright’ or ‘just getting by’, they are a homeowner or they are divorced, separated or never married compared with those who are married or cohabiting. Trustworthiness also is more likely among subjects who are divorced or separated relative to those who are married or cohabiting, and less likely among subjects who perceive their financial situation as ‘just getting by’ or ‘difficult’. We also analyse the effect of attitudes towards risks on trust.

A recent article by Gray, Stockard, and Stone contended that the increase in the proportion of births to unmarried women since 1974 in the United States was not caused by any major change in underlying fertility behavior, but rather by a decrease in the proportion of women who are married, which increased both the population at risk and the birth rate of unmarried women relative to that of married women. In this comment, I argue that the statistical test of this explanation used in the article is invalid because the variables in the analysis are not stationary time series. Correct statistical tests reject the explanation. In particular, I demonstrate persistent, nonstationary deviations from the relationships predicted by the theory advanced by Gray et al. For long periods, the proportion unmarried played only a small role in the changes in the ratio of nonmarital to marital birth rates, contrary to the theory.

Summary: A common finding in analyses of geographic mobility is a strong association between past movement and current mobility. We argue that one of the driving forces behind this pattern is the strength of local social ties outside the household. We use data from the British Household Panel Survey on the location of the three closest friends and the frequency of meetings with them. We estimate the processes of friendship formation and residential mobility jointly, allowing for correlation between the two processes. Our results show that a larger number of close friends living nearby substantially reduces movement of 20 miles or more.

There is growing evidence that differences in children's intellectual, emotional and behavioural development by parents' socio-economic status emerge at early ages and that these differences cast a long shadow over subsequent achievements. This article demonstrates with the Millennium Cohort Study that differences by parents‘ income group in cognitive and behavioural development emerge by the child's third birthday. It shows that an important part of these differences can be accounted for by ‘what parents do’ in terms of educational activities and parenting style.

The aim of this paper is to analyze intergenerational earnings mobility in Britain for cohorts of sons born between 1950 and 1972. Since there are no British surveys with information on both sons’ and their fathers’ earnings covering the above period, we consider two separate samples from the British Household Panel Survey. We combine information from the two samples using the two-sample two-stage least squares estimator described by Arellano and Meghir (1992). Our main result shows that intergenerational earnings mobility was stable for the cohorts born between 1950 and 1960 and decreased statistically significantly among more recent cohorts, those born during 1961–1972.

Summary: This paper uses a new source of data to study the dramatic increase in cohabiting unions in Great Britain. It analyses, in turn, entry into first partnership, the stability of cohabiting unions and repartnering after dissolution of cohabitation. In excess of 70% of first partnerships are now cohabitations, and these last a relatively short time before being either turned into marriage or dissolved. The shift to cohabitation as the dominant mode of first partnership plays an important role in the delay of first marriage and motherhood. The paper also investigates the factors that are associated with the outcome of cohabitations.