To the average householder the concept of economic insecurity needs no introduction. Most people will be familiar (or at least be able to empathize) with the sense of stress or anxiety that is associated with an uncertain financial future. Fear of events such as unemployment, losses in asset values, unexpected expenses and property crime detract from our current sense of well-being,1 and hence the anxiety stemming from these sources is deserving of scientific examination. Up until recently, however, research into insecu-rity has been largely neglected by academic economists. There are probably a couple of reasons for this being the case. Firstly, insecurity is by its very nature a phenomenon that deals with unobservable, forward-looking expectations rather than what has happened in past. Secondly, it is highly subjective and idiosyncratic; two seemingly similar individuals may have wildly different perceptions about the future and hence one may feel much more insecure than the other. These underlying issues make objective and comprehensive meas-urement difficult, a fact which seems to have discouraged serious quantitative research. However, there is an increasing acceptance that economic insecurity is an impor-tant welfare concept. The clearest recognition of this comes from the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) 1994 Human Development Report (HDR) which introduces and defines the broader notion of human security. This is defined over seven areas: economic, food, health, environment, personal, community and political security. The document states that economic security ‘requires an assured basic income for indi-viduals, usually from productive and remunerative work or, as a last resort, from a publicly financed safety net’ (HDR, p. 25). Osberg and Sharpe (2012) point out that these state-ments have the virtue of coming from human rights declarations which have a legitimate claim to reflect the preferences of the people they represent. Given the wide-ranging authority of the United Nations, this constitutes strong evidence of the degree to which individuals and their governments value a sense of economic safety.