Employment

CEP discussion paper

The labour market dynamics of households: eyes down for a full house

Little is known about the dynamic factors that shape movements in household labour market stocks. Expanding on the literature used to analyse individual labour market flows, we apply and extend dynamic techniques to the ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Impact:

The lack of women at the top of the academic ladder is driven by unequal childcare responsibilities

Motherhood, and the unequal childcare responsibilities that follow, explain a large share of the observed gender gap in academic employment. Sofie Cairo, Ria Ivandic, Anne Sophie Lassen and Valentina Tartari find that th...Read more...

Blog

University of Oxford:

Expert Comment: The firms racing to replace people with AI will be the first to fall

Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Professor of Economics and Behavioural Science at Oxford's Sa??d Business School and CEP Associate, argues that companies racing to replace staff with AI risk hollowing out their own future....Read more...

CentrePiece article

Supporting new fathers, Spanish style

Use-it-or-lose-it paternity leave combined with full pay is changing norms....Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Manipulation and selection in unemployment insurance

In this paper, we study the selection patterns of individuals who manage to have their lay-off delayed around an age at lay-off threshold entitling them to four additional months of unemployment insurance, that is, manip...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

Young people, human capital investment and the Great Recession

Policy makers recognise the importance of encouraging young people to stay in education for longer. We use the experience of the Great Recession in England to evaluate whether the incentive to invest in human capital bea...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Well designed paternity leave makes Spain a model of success

Spain recently equalised paternity and maternity leave at 16 weeks - but did fathers take advantage of the new policy? The answer is a resounding yes. Libertad Gonzalez, Lidia Farre, Claudia Hupkau and Jenifer Ruiz-Valen...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Mobile internet connectivity and household wealth in the Philippines

Mobile internet has become a fundamental component of modern infrastructure. In this paper, we consider the impact of mobile internet connectivity on household wealth in the Philippines. We construct a granular measure o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade diversion and labor market outcomes

In 2018 and 2019, the US administration increased tariffs on imports from China. Did these tariffs lead to more US imports from other countries such as Mexico? Using highly disaggregated data on the universe of Mexican f...Read more...

External report

A joined-up approach to UK skills policy

It is generally accepted that skills are a key driver of economic productivity and economic dynamism. They are a means by which individuals and communities can become resilient to social and economic change and are a key...Read more...

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

Better unemployment benefits could boost productivity and growth

The UK's job seeker's allowance for those who lose their job is much lower than the OECD average. Aadya Bahl argues that improving unemployment support is key not just for protecting workers but also for unlocking econom...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Gender gaps are reduced in family-friendly workplaces

The arrival of children is one of the primary reasons for gender inequalities in the labour market. Anna Raute shares her findings on how firms can help alleviate gender gaps through family-friendly policies....Read more...

Blog

What works centre for local economic growth:

Do cities and regions gain from public sector relocation?

In this guest blog, Dr. Max Nathan, Henry Overman, Capucine Riom, and Maria Sanchez-Vidal set out evidence on the impact of BBC (partial) relocation to Salford on wider employment in the area. This blog was originally pu...Read more...

Blog

Project Syndicate:

What AI Means for Growth and Jobs

While many commentators warn that AI will undermine employment and offer only modest productivity gains, empirical studies continue to suggest otherwise. With the right policies in place, the technology holds immense pot...Read more...

Journal article

Industrial Relations:

Diversity and social capital within the workplace: evidence from Britain

This article uses the British Workplace Employee Relations Survey to investigate the links between gender or ethnic diversity and workers' level of trust in managers or the extent of identity with the values and objectiv...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

The high price of doing nothing: evaluating an expansion of employment support for health-related inactivity

Employment support for those with mild-to-moderate health conditions is estimated to deliver large benefits to the individual and government finances, paying for itself within 5 years. This suggests enabling inactive ind...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Achieving net zero by 2050 requires changes to the UK skills landscape

As COP29 brings climate action into focus, it's clear that policy must go beyond carbon trading and finance. To make net zero a reality, the workforce must be equipped with the right skills. Aadya Bahl examines what this...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Better work: whose business is it?

Regulating the labour market is essential to address the inherent imbalance of power between employers and employees. But that doesn?t necessarily mean that the state needs to intervene more than it already does. Alan Ma...Read more...

Government consultation

Industry and Regulators Committee

The UK is a service-led economy, with strengths in sectors such as financial and business services, the creative and cultural industries, and life sciences, which together employ 20% of the workforce. To build on these s...Read more...

Blog

LSE USAPP:

How women-owned employment agencies in the 1950s and 1960s helped women to get better jobs and better pay

When employers discriminate against women, whether through prejudice or ignorance, women are paid less and miss out on higher-quality jobs. Historically, one way of dealing with this discrimination was for women to set u...Read more...

Journal article

Review of Economics and Statistics:

A year older, a year wiser (and farther from frontier): invention rents and human capital depreciation

We look at how the arrival of an invention affects wage returns and the probability of moving out of employment for white- and blue-collar co-workers of the inventor. First results suggest that older workers are hurt by ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do female-owned employment agencies mitigate discrimination and expand opportunity for women?

We create a dataset of 14,000 hand-coded help-wanted advertisements placed by employment agencies in three U.S. newspapers in 1950 and 1960, a time when help-wanted advertisements were divided into male and female sectio...Read more...

Blog

Politics and Policy:

Smarter, not more regulation will lead to better work

A long tradition in economics says that if an employer and a worker agree a contract on any terms both parties must be made better-off or otherwise they would not have agreed to the contract in the first place. If that w...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

How can the UK's apprenticeship system be improved?

Apprenticeships are intended to provide opportunities for young people as they move from education to working life. But the way things operate in the UK means that those who would most benefit are often missing out. Appr...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Task-based discrimination

We develop a task-based model of occupational sorting to identify and quantify the effect of discrimination, racial skill gaps, and aggregate task prices on Black-White differences in labor market outcomes over time. At ...Read more...

Journal article

International Economic Review:

2020 Klein lecture-investment and subjective uncertainty

A longstanding challenge in evaluating the impact of uncertainty on investment is obtaining measures of managers' subjective uncertainty. We address this challenge by using a detailed survey measure of uncertainty collec...Read more...

Journal article

The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization:

Noncompete agreements in a rigid labor market: the case of Italy

Noncompete agreements limiting the mobility of workers have been found to be widespread in the United States, a flexible and lightly regulated labor market. We explore the use of noncompete agreements in a rigid and high...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

The persisting pay gap and the motherhood penalty

Despite progress in gender equality, the pay gap continues to be a major challenge. Policymakers are yet to understand the nuances and intricate mechanics of why women's earnings take a hit after they become mothers, arg...Read more...

Journal article

LSE Public Policy Review:

The value and limits of unemployment insurance

This paper reviews some recent findings regarding unemployment and unemployment insurance in particular, drawing on comprehensive administrative data from Sweden. Firstly, it explores the value of unemployment insurance,...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Does providing gig workers with unemployment insurance create a moral hazard?

Non-standard workers doing short-term, flexible jobs are a growing segment of the labour force, which poses difficult questions. Is it good policy to provide unemployment insurance to them? Do people engage in gig work b...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Gender gaps from labour market downturns

How quickly do men and women find work after mass lay-offs due to workplace closures? Research by Ria Ivandic and Anne Sophie Lassen reveals that women face a greater risk of unemployment than men and lose a larger share...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Generational diversity is on the rise, and those embracing it are gaining a competitive edge

Major firms are experiencing a widening gap between their youngest and oldest employees. Daniel Jolles and Grace Lordan write that frictions which undermine the potential productivity benefits of generational diversity a...Read more...

Blog

Notes from Poland:

Six myths about inequality in Poland

Pawel Bukowski discusses and debunks some of the common misconceptions regarding inequality in Poland....Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

To improve performance and inclusion, firms must break silos between teams

Investment in diversity, equity and inclusion is critical to business performance and ability to compete, but the lack of meaningful change remains a barrier to progress. An often-overlooked pathway to change is to work ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

What Claudia Goldin taught economics about women, labour markets and pay gaps

When Claudia Goldin's research on women's work became influential in the 1980s, the study of gender was far from mainstream in economics. Four decades later, that is no longer the case, in large part thanks to her influe...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Gender gaps from labour market shocks

Many workers will face unemployment at some point during their careers and research shows that job loss can lead to persistently lower earnings. But that research is chiefly about men. Ria Ivandic and Anne Sophie Lassen ...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Wages and vacancy duration

In a dynamic labour market, employer market power is jointly determined by the entry and exit margins of labour supply - ie the extent to which higher wages ease recruitment and improve rentention. Ihsaan Bassier, Alan M...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Econometrics:

Union membership density and wages: the role of worker, firm, and job-title heterogeneity

We examine the association between union density and wages in Portugal where just 10 percent of all workers are union members but nine-tenths of them are covered by collective agreements. Using a unique dataset on worker...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Women in the workplace: 50 years of change

Decades of progress have seen greater opportunities for women in the workplace, but sizeable gender gaps remain in most indicators of economic achievement. Stefania Albanesi, Claudia Olivetti, and Barbara Petrongolo revi...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Automation creates the space for entirely new jobs: the UK must adopt, adapt and improve

Fears about robots taking people's jobs are overplayed, say Rui Costa and Yuanhang Yu. Their research shows the real fear to overcome should be Britain's lack of productivity-enhancing robots, software, artificial intell...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

How might changes in student visa provision affect UK immigration levels?

Net migration to the UK has reached record highs. International students are included in the immigration statistics and the government has implied it may seek to limit their future numbers. More research is needed to des...Read more...

Blog

The Conversation:

Pay inequality is high in South Africa: bosses are part of the problem

South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world. This income inequality is mostly due to high unemployment and large differences in wages. In South Africa today, economists and policy-makers typically foc...Read more...

Journal article

Economie et Statistique :

Recruitment difficulties and firms' characteristics: an analysis of French company data

This article uses a survey conducted in 2019 among companies in the manufacturing sector on recruitment difficulties they may encounter. By linking this information with the companies' income statements, we show that the...Read more...

Journal article

Economy Policy:

Dennis Novy discussion of: Startups and employment

New firms, or startups, come into being all the time. Their lives are precarious at the beginning: many firms close down after a short while, and only few firms have a long-run future. Among those that survive, a small m...Read more...

Journal article

Feminist Economics :

Career and family: women's century-long journey toward equity

The main argument in Claudia Goldin's new book, Career and Family, is that "greedy jobs" are the main obstacle for an economy to complete the last stage of the gender revolution: women's equality in the labor market and ...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Minimum wages and living wages: what happens in times of inflation?

It is widely accepted that minimum wages are an effective way to help workers at the lower end of the income distribution without damaging their job opportunities. But while the UK's minimum wage has risen faster than th...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

How to future-proof your career

The job market is in constant flux; industries change or become obsolete and new technologies emerge and disrupt. In conversation with Jasmine Virhia, Grace Lordan explains what strategies we can put in place now to make...Read more...

Blog

IFS Explainer:

Why is inequality in the labour market growing? (video)

The world of work is changing. There have been huge shifts in the kinds of work we do and the types of organisations we work for. What has been happening to inequalities in the UK's labour market? What have been the imp...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Low pay and insecurity in the UK labour market

Minimum wage increases have driven down the incidence of low hourly pay, but there has been much less progress elsewhere for low earners. Low pay is widespread among the self-employed, who do not benefit from the minimum...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Return to work: a dictionary of behavioural biases

Firms are increasingly allowing their employees to decide if they work at home or in the office. But the return to work is fraught with many biases. Julia Bladinieres-Justo, Aleesha Bruce, Anisah Ramli, Nichaphat Surawat...Read more...

Journal article

Economic Policy:

Unsafe jobs, labour market risk and social protection

This paper proposes a new classification of occupations based on the extent to which they put workers at risk of being infected by aerial-transmitted viruses. We expand on previous work that mainly focused on the identif...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

The progressive quandary: how to design an immigration policy that balances competing objectives

There is a tension between strong employment rights, a supportive welfare state, equal rights for migrants and locals, and an open, non-selective immigration policy that creates hard decisions for progressive politicians...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Economists discuss the impact of working from home on productivity, job satisfaction, and women's career progression

The pandemic has led to a big shift to working from home among people in occupations where it is possible for the jobs or some part of them to be done remotely. There has been much debate about the extent to which such f...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Return of the guest worker: guest or servant?

Demands for temporary visas are increasing in the UK, but few are discussing the details of how such short-term visas are going to work. Alan Manning writes a nuanced account of the trade-offs involved. The worse the con...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance:

The effects of parental job loss on children's outcomes

Severe economic downturns are typically characterized by a high incidence of job losses. The available evidence suggests that job losers suffer short-run earning losses that persist in the long run, are more likely to re...Read more...

Government consultation

Jobs, growth, and productivity after coronavirus

The Committee will examine how the Government can reduce and mitigate economic scarring and job losses after the pandemic, how much difference the Government can make to economic growth, and what has caused the UK's prod...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Beyond income inequality: non-monetary rewards to work

Discussion of income inequality focuses primarily on wages with limited consideration of the non-monetary rewards to work, not least the satisfaction that employees experience in doing their jobs. Andrew Clark, Maria Cot...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The motherhood penalty for working women in Spain

Spain has seen a huge influx of women into the workplace in recent decades, but their experiences of work remain very different from those of men. As Claudia Hupkau and Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela explain, there is scope for...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Ethnic minorities and the UK labour market

Contrary to the impression given by the Sewell Report, there has been little change in disparities in pay, employment and unemployment among different ethnic groups in the UK over the past 25 years. Indeed, as analysis o...Read more...

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

Contrary to the impression given by the Sewell Report, things for ethnic minorities in the UK labour market are not getting better

Using estimates from the Labour Force Survey, Alan Manning and Rebecca Rose fill in some of the gaps of the government's Sewell Report on race and ethnic disparities. Comparing disparities in pay, employment, and unemplo...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Parents, schools and human capital differences across countries

This paper studies the contribution of parental influence in accounting for cross-country gaps in human capital achievements. We argue that the cross-country variation in unobserved parental characteristics is at least a...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Work and children: is the motherhood penalty in Spain too high for working women?

Spain has seen a huge influx of women into the workplace, but men and women's experiences of work remain very different. Claudia Hupkau and Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela say there is scope for new family-friendly policies to h...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

The local economic impacts of regeneration projects: evidence from UK's single regeneration budget

Many governments aim to improve the labour market outcomes of people living in deprived areas through "place-making" initiatives. Economists are often sceptical about the effectiveness of such policies, but empirical evi...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Trapped factors and China?s impact on global growth

After a recent increase in Chinese import competition, European firms increased innovation. We present and rationalise these patterns using `trapped factors? at the micro level within a stylised equilibrium model of prod...Read more...

Blog

The State of Working Britain:

Who's being made redundant during Covid? Who is staying at work. And is it any different from usual?

Following his previous blog post looking at trends in redundancies over the COVID period relative to previous downturns, Jonathan Wadsworth looks to understand who is being laid off and whether this is any different from...Read more...

Blog

The State of Working Britain:

Redundancies and the labour market under Covid. Has furlough helped? And other related things you may have missed

Redundancies are often seen as commensurate with unemployment - but not always. In this blog post, Jonathan Wadsworth analyses the links between the UK's furlough scheme and redundancies....Read more...

Blog

CVER Blog:

Stark contrast between pre- and post-16 provision in UTCs

At a time when Prime Minister Boris Johnson has put the governmenta??s skills policy agenda in the spotlight, Guglielmo Ventura presents findings from his research seeking to understand whether UTCs were successful at br...Read more...

Blog

The State of Working Britain:

UK labour market under Covid part 3: layoffs, hiring & wages

Recessions, usually signify a rise in layoffs. Even the last recession, which was accompanied by much more wage moderation than previous ones, generated a significant rise in redundancies. This time it is a little differ...Read more...

Blog

The State of Working Britain:

What's happening to the labour market under Covid-19? Part 2

So if unemployment, employment or more marginal types of working appear little changed under COVID, things are different from normal if we look elsewhere. Figure 1 shows the percentage of workers who say they had a job b...Read more...

Blog

The State of Working Britain:

What's happening to the UK labour market under Covid-19? Looking for signs of excess and what it shows (so far). Part 1

Six months into the worst pandemic of the modern era, the worst recession of the modern era and yet and yet .... the labour market is proving to be remarkably resilient (so far) ? at least along the dimensions normally ...Read more...

Journal article

SERIEs:

Job loss at home: children's school performance during the Great Recession

This paper studies the intergenerational impact of parental job loss on school performance during the Great Recession in Spain. Collecting data through parental surveys in a school in the province of Barcelona, I obtain ...Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

Intergenerational effects of employment protection reforms

Job insecurity has worsened in most OECD countries in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Using Labour Force Survey data, I estimate the link between parental job insecurity (as measured by the contract type held by pa...Read more...

Journal article

Economic Journal:

Can helping the sick hurt the able? Incentives, information and disruption in a welfare reform

The UK Jobcentre Plus reform sharpened bureaucratic incentives to help disability benefit recipients (relative to unemployment insurance recipients) into jobs. In the long run, the policy raised exits off disability bene...Read more...

Journal article

Economic Policy:

Zero hours contracts and labour market policy

The evolving nature of atypical work arrangements is studied. A particular focus is placed on one such form of work relation: zero hour contracts (ZHCs). The paper uses existing secondary data and new survey data collect...Read more...

Journal article

Economics Letters:

The regional effects of Germany's national minimum wage

We show that the minimum wage introduced in Germany in 2015 led to spatial wage convergence, in particular in the left tail of the distribution, without reducing relative employment in low-wage regions within the first t...Read more...

Journal article

Industrial and Corporate Change:

A cross-country analysis of start-up employment dynamics

This article carries out a detailed descriptive analysis of employment dynamics of new firms, using comparable and highly representative data for 19 countries. It does so by using a novel analytical decomposition of the ...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

The persistence of local joblessness

Differences in employment-population ratios across US commuting zones have persisted for many decades. We claim these disparities represent real gaps in economic opportunity for individuals of fixed characteristics. Thes...Read more...

Journal article

Social science & medicine:

Ownership and hospital behaviour: employment and local unemployment

In this paper, we address two issues: i) how hospital employment changes with local unemployment, according to the type of hospital ownership, and ii) whether this relationship changed after the implementation of a pro-c...Read more...

Journal article

Economic Policy:

Who voted for Brexit? A comprehensive district-level analysis

On 23 June 2016, the British electorate voted to leave the European Union (EU). We analyse vote and turnout shares across 380 local authority areas in the United Kingdom. We find that exposure to the EU in terms of immig...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

How local are labor markets? Evidence from a spatial job search model

This paper models the optimal search strategies of the unemployed across space to characterize local labor markets. Our methodology allows for linkages between numerous areas, while preserving tractability. We estimate t...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Is modern technology responsible for jobless recoveries?

Since the early 1990s, recoveries from recessions in the US have been plagued by weak employment growth. We investigate whether a similar problem afflicts other developed economies, and whether technology is a culprit. W...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Tackling long-term unemployment

Barbara Petrongolo surveys the research evidence on the effectiveness of the 'sticks' and 'carrots' of active labour market policies....Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Immigration, offshoring, and American jobs

Following Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) we present a model in which tasks of varying complexity are matched to workers of varying skill in order to develop and test predictions regarding the effects of immigration a...Read more...

Journal article

Economica:

Unemployment in the Great Recession

This paper studies the responses of unemployment in Germany, the USA and the UK to the Great Recession of 2008-9 using Beveridge curve analysis, and in the entire OECD using other techniques. It is shown that the UK suff...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Unemployment in the Great Recession

This paper studies the responses of unemployment in Germany, the United States and Britain to the Great Recession of 2008-09 by making use of Beveridge curve analysis, and in the entire OECD with other techniques. It is ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Transferable Scars: A Longitudinal Evidence of Psychological Impact of Past Parental Unemployment on Adolescents in the United Kingdom

Using a longitudinal data of British youths, this paper explores the consequences of past parental unemployment on the current happiness and self-esteem of the children. We find that a past unemployment spell of the fath...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Immigration, Offshoring and American Jobs

How do offshoring and immigration affect the employment of native workers? What kinds of jobs suffer, or benefit, most from the competition created by offshore and immigrant workers? In contrast to the existing literatur...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Jobs in a recession

This article is based on a paper that models unemployment as the result of matching frictions and job rationing. Job rationing is a shortage of jobs arising naturally in an economic equilibrium from the combination of so...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Role of Worker Flows in the Dynamics and Distribution of UK Unemployment

Unemployment varies substantially over time and across subgroups of the labour market. Worker flows among labour market states act as key determinants of this variation. We examine how the structure of unemployment acros...Read more...

Book

Combatting Unemployment
IZA Prize in Labor Economics

Combatting Unemployment is a collection of key papers from seminal labour economists Richard Layard and Stephen J. Nickell. The authors received the IZA Prize in Labor Economics in 2008 for their path-breaking work o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do Matching Frictions Explain Unemployment? Not in Bad Times

This paper models unemployment as the result of matching frictions and job rationing. Job rationing is a shortage of jobs arising naturally in an economic equilibrium from the combination of some wage rigidity and dimini...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Jobs in the recession

The recession of 2008-09 inflicted a larger cumulative loss of UK output than any of the previous post-war recessions, yet there has been a relatively low loss of employment, at least so far. Paul Gregg and Jonathan Wads...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

The UK labour market and the 2008 - 2009 recession

The recession of 2008-2009 inflicted a larger cumulative loss of UK output than any of the other post-war recessions. Nevertheless, employment rates remained higher than might have been expected given the experience of p...Read more...

CEP election analysis

CEP Election Analysis 2010 - The complete Series, discussing research on some of the key policy battlegrounds of the 2010 General Election

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CEP election analysis

Jobs and Youth Unemployment: It's bad, but not as bad as you might think

Read more...

CEP occasional paper

The impact of policy change on job retention and advancement

This paper examines the impact of the Working Families Tax Credit (WFTC) on employment retention and advancement. The WFTC, which replaced Family Credit in October 1999, supplemented earnings of low paid workers living i...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Resurrecting the Participation Margin

This paper considers a real business cycle model with search frictions in the labor market and labor supply which is elastic along the participation margin. Previous authors have found that such models generate counterfa...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Labor Market Institutions Around the World

This paper documents the large cross-country differences in labor institutions that make them a candidate explanatory factor for the divergent economic performance of countries and reviews what economists have learned ab...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Unemployment and Hours of Work: The North Atlantic Divide Revisited

I examine the dynamic evolutions of unemployment, hours of work and the service share since the war in the United States and Europe. The theoretical model brings together all three and emphasizes technological growth. Co...Read more...

Book

Unemployment: Macroeconomic Performance and the Labour Market

This book aims to provide a basis for better unemployment policy: showing how the lessons learned from experience and theory can be applied to greatly reduce the waste and misery of high unemployment. The book surveys th...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Evaluating the employment impact of a mandatory job search program

This paper exploits area-based piloting and age-related eligibility rules to identify treatment effects of a labor market program-the New Deal for Young People in the U.K. A central focus is on substitution/displacement ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Employment and Taxes

This paper considers the impact of taxation policy on market work. On the basis of the evidence, we find that a 10 percentage point rise in the tax wedge will reduce overall labour input provided via the market by around...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Picture of European Unemployment: Success and Failure.

Average unemployment in Europe today is relatively high compared with OECD countries outside Europe. The majority of countries in Europe today have lower unemployment than any OECD country outside Europe, including the U...Read more...

Book

The Wage Curve

The Wage Curve casts doubt on some of the most important ideas in macroeconomics, labor economics, and regional economics. According to macroeconomic orthodoxy, there is a relationship between unemployment and the ra...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Non-working classes

Steadily falling national jobless figures hide a 20-year rise in the number of workless families, in the length of time spent by individuals out of work and in the number of older men dropping out of employment entirely....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Fixed-Term Contracts and Unemployment: An Efficiency Wage Analysis

During the 1980s, many European countries introduced fixed-term contracts to fight high and persistent levels of unemployment. Although these contracts have been widely used, unemployment has remained about the same afte...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Employment Patterns in OECD Countries

This paper studies the dynamics of labour demand and the determinants of employment rates across the OECD. We find: (i) labour demand adjusts less rapidly when employment protection is more strict and union density is hi...Read more...

Book

Tackling Inequality

Richard Layard is one of Britain's foremost applied economists, whose work has had a profound impact on the policy debate in Britain and abroad.  This book contains his most influential articles on the subject of u...Read more...

Book

Tackling Unemployment

Richard Layard is one of Britain's foremost applied economists whose work has had a profound impact on the policy debate in Britain and abroad. This book contains his most influential articles on unemployment. It is publ...Read more...