Results

CentrePiece article

Remembering our friend and colleague David Metcalf

A widely-admired economist whose work on labour markets led to a number of high-profile roles in public life...Read more...

Journal article

Management Science:

How do chief executive officers make strategy?

We survey 262 chief executive officer (CEO) alumni of Harvard Business School and gather evidence on three aspects of each executive?s strategy practice: how formalized it is, how it is developed, and how it is implement...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...

Journal article

Journal of Development Economics:

The firm-pay gender gap and formal sector churn over the life cycle

We find that women sorting into lower paying firms explains nearly half of the gender pay gap in South Africa. Using matched employer-employee panel data covering the universe of formal workers, we show sorting varies co...Read more...

Journal article

Management Science:

Communication within firms: evidence from CEO turnovers

This paper uses novel, firm-level communication measures derived from communications metadata several months before and after a CEO transition for 102 firms to study whether and how this organizational event is reflected...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Employer screening and optimal unemployment insurance

Field experiments show that employers are less likely to consider long-term unemployed job-seekers for interviews. We study the implications for optimal unemployment insurance (UI). Based on a structural model of job sea...Read more...

Journal article

British Journal of Industrial Relations:

Pay transparency intervention and the gender pay gap: evidence from research-intensive universities in the UK

This study investigates the impact of a pay transparency intervention in reducing the gender pay gap in the UK university sector. Introduced in 2007, the initiative enabled public access to average annual earnings disagg...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...

Chapter

Women's representation and the gender pay gap: rank, institutional research intensity and ethnicity in UK business schools

in Research Handbook on Inequalities and Work

We employ a multi-faceted framework to explore the importance of women's representation to the gender pay gap (GPG) in all UK business schools to analyse an authoritative and complete administrative sample from the Highe...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Geography:

Pay-as-they-get-in: attitudes toward migrants and pension systems

We study whether a better knowledge of the functioning of pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension systems and recent demographic trends affects natives? attitudes toward immigration. In two online experiments conducted in Italy and...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Public Economics:

Estimating students' valuation for college experiences

Quantifying the consumption value of college - the utility students derive from in-person instruction and on-campus social activities - has been challenging. We leverage the COVID-19 shock to elicit students' intended li...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Pay-as-they-get-in: attitudes towards migrants and pension systems

We study whether a better knowledge of the functioning of pay-as-you-go pension systems and recent demographic trends in the hosting country affects natives' attitudes towards immigration. In two online experiments in It...Read more...

Journal article

Review of Economics and Statistics :

Ask a local: improving the public pricing of land titles in urban Tanzania

Information on willingness-to-pay is key for public pricing and allocation of services but not easily collected. Studying land titles in Dar-es-Salaam, we ask whether local leaders know and will reveal plot owners' willi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Company wage policy in a low-wage labor market

We study how firms set wages for their employees when they can legally age discriminate across workers. We exploit an age-specific minimum wage change in the UK, which raised the minimum applying to workers aged 25 and o...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...

CEP discussion paper

Ask a local: improving the public pricing of land titles in urban Tanzania

Information on willingness-to-pay is key for public pricing and allocation of services but not easily collected. Studying land titles in Dar-es-Salaam, we ask whether local leaders know and will reveal plot owners' willi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Have productivity and pay decoupled in the UK?

In the long-run at the macro level, the real pay of workers tends to follow labour productivity. In recent years, however, there have been concerns that this relationship has broken down and that pay has become "decouple...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... UK gender pay gap reporting: a crude but effective policy

Forcing employers to reveal their gender pay gap has been effective in its main goal of narrowing the gap, according to research by Jack Blundell who finds the difference between women and men's pay has shrunk by just un...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

CEO pay and the rise of relative performance contracts: a question of governance?

We exploit the large rise in relative performance awards in the United Kingdom over the last two decades to investigate whether these contracts improve the alignment between CEO pay and firm performance. We first documen...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Communication within firms: evidence from CEO turnovers

This paper uses novel, firm-level measures derived from communications metadata before and after a CEO transition in 102 firms to study if CEO turnover impacts employees' communication flows. We find that CEO turnover le...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

Economics Observatory:

Update: How is coronavirus affecting the self-employed?

A year into the Covid-19 crisis, it is widely recognised that the UK's self-employed workers have been among the hardest hit. Survey evidence shows that the latest lockdown is once again leaving the self-employed with lo...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

UK gender pay gap reporting: a crude but effective policy?

Forcing employers to reveal their gender pay gap has been effective in its main goal of narrowing the gap. The difference between women's and men's pay has shrunk by just under a fifth at affected employers. Jack Blundel...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Wage responses to gender pay gap reporting requirements

In this paper I study a policy in which employers are required to publicly report gender pay gap statistics. Proponents argue that increasing the information available to workers and consumers places pressure on firms to...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The motivational cost of inequality: pay gaps reduce the willingness to pursue rewards

Factors beyond a person?s control, such as demographic characteristics at birth, often influence the availability of rewards an individual can expect for their efforts. We know surprisingly little how such pay-gaps due t...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The gig economy and workers' preferences for steady jobs

Is the rise of gig work, freelancing, zero hours contracts and self-employment a result of people wanting such work or because they have no other choice? Nikhil Datta finds that while workers in the gig economy may like ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

CEO behavior and firm performance

We measure the behavior of over 1,100 CEOs in six countries (Brazil, France, Germany, India, UK and US) using a new methodology that combines (i) a survey measuring each activity undertaken in a random work-week by the e...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Willing to pay for security: a discrete choice experiment to analyse labour supply preferences

This paper investigates the extent to which labour supply preferences are responsible for the marked rise in atypical work arrangements in the UK and US. By employing vignettes in a discrete job choice experiment in a re...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Financial Studies:

Managing the family firm: evidence from CEOs at work

We build a comparable and bottom-up measure of CEO labor supply for 1,114 CEOs and investigate whether family and professional CEOs differ along this dimension. Family CEOs work 9% fewer hours relative to professional CE...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Family firms: the problem of second-generation bosses

Although family firms are widely praised as the `backbone of the economy?, their productivity is often hampered by weak management. Research by Daniela Scur and Renata Lemos provides new evidence on the performance of `d...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

All in the family? CEO choice and firm organization

Family firms are the most prevalent firm type in the world, particularly in emerging economies. Dynastic family firms tend to have lower productivity, though what explains their underperformance is still an open question...Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

Top earnings inequality and the gender pay gap: Canada, Sweden, and the United Kingdom

This paper explores the consequences of the under-representation of women in top jobs for the overall gender pay gap. Using administrative annual earnings data from Canada, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, it applies the ...Read more...

Blog

ESRC blog:

How English care homes have coped with the National Living Wage

Giulia Giupponi is an ESRC-funded PhD student at the London School of Economics and a research assistant at the Centre for Economic Performance. Stephen Machin is Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Traffic Externalities and Housing Prices: Evidence from the London Congestion Charge

This study exploits the introduction of the London Congestion Charge (CC) that greatly improves traffic conditions in Central London to provide new evidence on the capitalization of traffic externalities onto housing val...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

CEO pay and the rise of relative performance contracts: a question of governance?

Would moving to relative performance contracts improve the alignment between CEO pay and performance? To address this, we exploit the large rise in relative performance awards and the share of equity pay in the UK over ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Family business: management effort and firm performance

Might familyowned, familyrun firms be a serious obstacle to productivity growth in Europe? Oriana Bandiera, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun have collected time use data on over 1,000 chief executive officers to explore d...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Oil: the impact on women's work

Stephan Maurer and Andrei Potlogea explore whether oil-dominated economies are naturally biased against women's labour market participation....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Has performance pay increased wage inequality in Britain?

Using data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) we show performance pay (PP) increased earnings dispersion among men and women, and to a lesser extent among full-time working women, in the decade of economic gr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do women earn less even as social entrepreneurs?

Based upon unique survey data collected using respondent driven sampling methods, we investigate whether there is a gender pay gap among social entrepreneurs in the UK. We find that women as social entrepreneurs earn 29%...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Fueling the gender gap? Oil and women's labor and marriage market outcomes

This paper analyzes the effect of resource-based economic specialization on women's labor market outcomes. Using information on the location and discovery of major oil fields in the Southern United States coupled with a ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Are firms paying more for performance?

Despite its potential to raise productivity, performance-related-pay (PRP) is not widespread in market-oriented economies. Furthermore, despite secular changes conducive to its take-up, there is mixed evidence as to whet...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Managing the family firm: evidence from CEOs at work

We present evidence on the labor supply of CEOs, and on whether family and professional CEOs differ on this dimension. We do so through a new survey instrument that allows us to codify CEOs? diaries in a detailed and com...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

CEO Incentive Contracts in China: Why Does City Location Matter?

CEO incentive contracts are commonplace in China but their incidence varies significantly across Chinese cities. We show that city and provincial policy experiments help explain this variance. We examine the role of two ...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Extreme wage inequality: pay at the very top

We provide new evidence on the growth in pay at the very top of the wage distribution in the UK. Sectoral decompositions show that workers in the financial sector have accounted for the majority of the gains at the top o...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

What do we know about China's CEO's? Evidence from across the whole economy

All that we know about the CEO labour market in China comes from studies of public listed companies and state-owned enterprises (SOEs). This paper is the first to examine the operation of the CEO labour market across all...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Are public sector employees overcompensated?

Alexander Danzer and Peter Dolton use the concept of 'total reward' to assess whether public sector pay and pensions are too high relative to the private sector....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The CEO Labour Market in China's Public Listed Companies

Using panel data for all of China?s public listed firms over the period 2001-2010 we examine how firms have recruited and rewarded their executives over a decade of huge growth and turbulence. CEO pay is sensitive to fir...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... UK chief executives: paid for performance?

Does it matter whether you work for a successful company? And if so, does it matter who you are? To answer these questions we construct a unique panel dataset covering the pay of all CEOs, senior managers and a fully rep...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Matching Firms, Managers, and Incentives

We exploit a unique combination of administrative sources and survey data to study the match between firms and managers. The data includes manager characteristics, such as risk aversion and talent; firm characteristics, ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Span of Control and Span of Activity

For both practitioners and researchers, span of control plays an important role in defining and understanding the role of the CEO. In this paper, we combine organizational chart information for a sample of 65 companies w...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

CEO Bonding: Who Posts Performance Bonds and Why?

Despite their theoretical value in tackling principal-agent problems at low cost to firms there is almost no empirical literature on the prevalence and correlates of performance bonds posted by corporate executives. Usin...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Paying for Performance: Incentive Pay Schemes and Employees' Financial Participation

We present new comparable data on the incidence of performance pay schemes in Europe and the USA. We find that the percentage of employees exposed to incentive pay schemes ranges from around 10-15 percent in some Europea...Read more...

Government consultation

BIS - Executive Remuneration Discussion Paper

Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does High Involvement Management Improve Worker Wellbeing?

Employees exposed to high involvement management (HIM) practices have higher subjective wellbeing, fewer accidents but more short absence spells than ?like? employees not exposed to HIM. These results are robust to exten...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Teachers' pay and pupil performance

If you pay peanuts, do you get monkeys? If teachers were better paid and higher up the national income distribution, would there be an improvement in pupil performance? Peter Dolton and Oscar Marcenaro-Gutierrez examine ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Simple Theory of Managerial Talent, Pay Contracts and Wage Distribution

This paper develops a simple theory of pay structures and pay levels across heterogeneous agents by bringing together optimal contracts inside the firm and competitive resource allocation in the market. The central idea ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Managerial Incentives and Compensation in a Global Market

This paper embeds a principal-agent firm in an otherwise standard trade model a la Melitz (2003) to investigate the impact of globalization on the provision of managerial incentives and on the distribution of managerial ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does High Involvement Management Lead to Higher Pay?

Using nationally representative survey data for Finnish employees linked to register data on their wages and work histories we find wage effects of high involvement management (HIM) practices are generally positive and s...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Men in black: the impact of new contracts on football referees' performance

In the 2001/02 English football season, referees of Premier League matches were paid a salary for the first time. Alex Bryson and colleagues investigate the impact on their performance....Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... The wage premium of two-footed footballers

The study of football - the clubs, the players, the managers, the referees - is telling us more and more about the operation of labour markets and incentives. Here, Alex Bryson and colleagues show that two-footedness - t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Paradox of Performance Related Pay Systems: 'Why Do We Keep Adopting Them in the Face of Evidence that they Fail to Motivate?'

This paper considers one of the paradoxes of incentive pay used in Britain?s public services, namely that despite much evidence that it does not motivate employees, it continues to be widely used. It is argued that behin...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Institutions and the Management of Human Resources: Incentive Pay Systems in France and Great Britain

Using data from large-scale establishment surveys in Britain and France, we show that incentive pay for non-managers is more widespread in France than in Britain. We explain this finding in terms of the `beneficial const...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Understanding the Gender Pay Gap: What's Competition Got to Do with It?

A number of papers have recently argued that men and women have different attitudes and behavioural responses to competition. Laboratory experiments suggest that these gender differences are very large but it is importan...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Comparing Willingness-to-Pay and Subjective Well-Being in the Context of Non-Market Goods

In order to value non-market goods, economists estimate individuals? willingness to pay (WTP) for these goods using revealed or stated preference methods. We compare these conventional approaches with subjective well-bei...Read more...

Manpower Human Resource Lab paper

Performance Pay and Within-Firm Wage Inequality

This paper examines the impact of performance-related pay on wage differentials within firms. Our theoretical framework predicts that, compared to a fixed pay system, pay schemes based on individual effort increase withi...Read more...

Manpower Human Resource Lab paper

Overqualification, Job Dissatisfaction and Increasing Dispersion in the Returns to Graduate Education

Increasing dispersion in the returns to graduate education is found, using quantile regression. This trend is related to rising overqualification. We distinguish between and validate measures of ?Real? and ?Formal? overq...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Education and Work:

Competition for private and state school teachers

We analyse the role of private schools in the teachers? labour market. Private schools employ an increasingly‐disproportionate share of teachers in Britain, relative to the number of their pupils. Their teachers ar...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Impact of Private Ownership, Incentives and Local Development Objectives on University Technology Transfer Performance

We study the impact of private ownership, incentive pay and local development objectives on university licensing performance. We develop and test a simple contracting model of technology licensing offices, using new surv...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Incentive Pay Systems and the Management of Human Resources in France and Great Britain

Incentive pay systems have undergone major changes in recent decades. This paper investigates use of incentive pay systems in British and French private sector establishments in 2004, focusing on payment-by-results, meri...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Pay for Performance Where Output is Hard to Measure: the Case of Performance Pay for School Teachers

The introduction of performance-related pay with Performance Management in the state school sector of England and Wales represents a considerable change in the school management system. After 2000, all teachers were subj...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Performance Pay for Teachers: Linking Individual and Organisational Level Targets

The introduction of performance-related pay and performance management schemes in the maintained, state, school sector represents a considerable change in the school management system. This paper combines the results of ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Gender Gap in Early Career Wage Growth

In the UK the gender pay gap on entry to the labour market is approximately zero but after ten years after labour market entry, there is a gender wage gap of almost 25 log points. This paper explores the reason for this ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

How Does Product Market Competition Shape Incentive Contracts?

This paper studies the effect of product market competition on the explicit compensation packages that firms offer to their CEOs, executives and workers. We use a large sample of both traded and non-traded UK firms and e...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Unions, Performance-Related Pay and Procedural Justice: the Case of Classroom Teachers

Performance-related pay (PRP) and performance management (PM) are now a part of the organizational landscape that unions face in the UK?s public services. While PRP and PM threaten the scope of traditional union bargaini...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Executive Compensation and Product Market Competition

The aim of this paper is to study the effects of product market competition on the explicit compensation packages that firms offer to their executives. In order to measure the net effect of competition we use two differe...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Unions and Procedural Justice: An Alternative to the 'Common Rule'

Can unions substitute a procedural justice role for their traditional reliance on establishing a ?common rule?? The decline of ?bureaucratic? models of employee management and the rise of performance pay and performance ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Matchmaking: the Influence of Monitoring Environments on the Effectiveness of Performance Pay Systems

This study uses cross-section and panel data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey to explore contextual influences on the relationship between performance-related pay (PRP) and organizational performance. Wh...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does Performance Pay De-Motivate, and Does It Matter?

The sheer scale and speed of the shift of payment system from time-based salaries to performance-related pay, PRP, in the British public services provides a unique opportunity to test the effects of incentive pay schemes...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Why Does Performance Pay De-Motivate: Financial Incentives versus Perfrormance Appraisal

The sheer scale and speed of the shift of payment system from time-based salaries to performance-related pay, PRP, in the British public services provides a unique opportunity to test the effects of incentive pay schemes...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Teachers Before the 'Threshold'

During the summer of 2000, the government will introduce a new system of pay and performance management for teachers. The Centre for Economic Performance is conducting a 'before-and-after' panel study of teachers and s...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Unions and the Sword of Justice: Unions and Pay Systems, Pay Inequality, Pay Discrimination and Low Pay

Dispersion in pay is lower among union members than among non-unionists. This reflects two factors. First, union members and jobs are more homogeneous than their non-union counterparts. Second, union wage policies within...Read more...