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In 1997, the UK's Labour government introduced several health policy changes, including plans for greater collaboration with private providers. Building on previous cross-sectional research, we explore longitudinal inequities in physician access as these policy changes were materializing. Using GEE models we examine the effect of income and private health insurance (PHI) coverage on access to physicians in the general UK population from 1997 to 2003. The study finds no income inequities in GP access. In contrast, those in the highest income quintile are more likely to access consultants overall (OR:1.10, CI: 1.01,1.19), particularly private consultants (OR:2.49, CI:1.80,3.44). Not surprisingly, PHI is a strong predictor of private consultant access (OR:8.72 CI: 7.04,10.82), but a weak predictor of overall consultant access (OR:1.09, CI:1.01, 1.17). None of these findings exhibited significant time trends across the years of study, thus indicating that the existing inequities remained stable in the UK, despite the aforementioned reforms.

This dissertation presents three essays on retirement and savings behaviour. It relies on secondary data from British national surveys to empirically address how workers prepare and adapt to the economic circumstances of later life. Chapter 1 analyses the effectiveness of providing workers with the opportunity to join workplace pension schemes to stimulate pension savings. It estimates the potential opt-in rate among employees who haven’t been offered a pension plan by an employer, had they been offered the opportunity to join a scheme. Governmental policies enforcing pension plan provision at every workplace could generate a major impact on aggregate participation rates. This potential success does not seem to be conditional on the existence of mechanisms imposed by law concerning the way workers are enrolled. Chapter 2 examines the effect of workplace pension schemes provision and participation on other individual financial savings, such as personal pension plans and financial assets. It exploits the variability in workplace pension scheme provision and membership induced by the employer’s payroll size as an identification strategy. No evidence is found that providing employees with access to workplace pension schemes would make them less likely to save through non-pension financial instruments. These results support the enforcement of the universal provision of workplace pension schemes as a national policy to improve financial preparation for retirement. Chapter 3 builds on the literature of the economic role of home production of goods and services at retirement. The literature usually restricts the explanation of retirees’ heterogeneous attitudes towards home production to gender differences or social norms related to couples’ division of labour. The present study provides novel evidence that non-cognitive skills in the form of personality traits explain the heterogeneous reallocation of time and consumption that occurs during a transition from the labour market to retirement.

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