Results

Blog

LSE Business Review:

New incentives for businesses to train their employees are needed for economic recovery from COVID-19

The need to retrain or upskill the workforce has become ever more urgent due to sharp changes in skills demand induced by the pandemic, write Jiaqi Li, Guglielmo Ventura and Anna Valero....Read more...

Blog

LSE Blogs:

What happened when parents lost their jobs during lockdown?

Many parents had to cope with losing their jobs or part of their income at the same time as they were forced to home school. How did this affect their children's learning and their mental health? Claudia Hupkau, Ingo Isp...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Labour market shocks during the Covid-19 pandemic: inequalities and child outcomes

We study the effect of negative labour market shocks borne by parents during the Covid-19 crisis on resource and time investments in children and the channels through which negative labour market shocks experienced by pa...Read more...

Blog

The State of Working Britain:

Long-Term Unemployment and the Covid Downturn

With the first signs of rising unemployment under the crisis are beginning to ripple through the labour market, Jonathan Wadsworth examines trends in employment against unemployment, the chances of finding work among tho...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Work, care, and gender across UK lockdowns

A growing body of research is making clear the unequal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic across gender. This column explores what the likely implications of a second lockdown in the UK are for gender equality at work and i...Read more...

Blog

State of Working Britain Blog:

1 Million Missing Immigrants (And 1.2 Million More UK-Born)

Jonathan Wadsworth examines the Labour Force Survey, highlighting the strange case of a rapid fall of around 750,000 in the immigrant population of working age over the last year contained in the latest ONS labour market...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

How lockdowns have reversed traditional gender roles in some UK households and further entrenched them in others

Claudia Hupkau and Barbara Petrongolo discuss what the likely implications of a second lockdown are for gender equality at work and in the home....Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Covid-19 and the self-employed: six months into the crisis

Six months after Covid-19 first hit, it is clear that it is the greatest economic crisis of the modern age. The economy has contracted far more rapidly than in previous crises, with GDP dropping by a record 19.5 per cent...Read more...

Blog

State of Working Britain Blog:

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

State of Working Britain Blog:

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...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Monopsony in labour markets: what it is, why it matters

Many firms are able to exploit the fact that it is hard for workers to move from one employer to another, keeping wages lower than they would be in a competitive market. As Alan Manning explains, labour markets are becom...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The crisis and job guarantees in urban India

This paper uses a new field survey of low-wage areas of urban India to show that employment and earnings were decimated by the lockdown resulting from the Covid-19 crisis. It examines workers’ desire for a job guarantee ...Read more...

CVER Briefing Note

Post-18 education – who is taking the different routes and how much do they earn?

This paper describes the educational trajectories and labour market outcomes for people who completed their GCSEs between 2002 and 2006. Our long span of longitudinal data enables us to follow these individuals through t...Read more...

Blog

The State of Working Britain blog:

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 blog:

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 blog:

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...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

What can previous recessions tell us about the Covid-19 downturn?

The labour market effects of the Covid-19 crisis measured as of June 2020 are compared with the three most recent UK recessions: the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and the downturn induced by the global financial crisis i...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Covid-19 and the work patterns of men and women

Claudia Hupkau and Barbara Petrongolo explore the impact of the pandemic on women's labour market prospects and ‘home production' responsibilities...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Dream jobs: managers in internationally active firms have higher lifetime wages

People at managerial level in international companies accumulate strong experience that is useful also in other firms, write Giordano Mion, Luca David Opromolla, and Gianmarco Ottaviano....Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19 blog:

How a job guarantee scheme can avoid the slide into long-term unemployment

Even if COVID-19 infection rates dwindle, it is now clear that the economy is unlikely to bounce back quickly. This raises the spectre of long-term unemployment. Richard Layard (LSE) explains how the government could dra...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

COVID-19 and gender gaps: Latest evidence and lessons from the UK

The social distancing and lockdowns associated with the COVID-19 crisis has hit service sectors with frequent interactions between consumers and providers which cannot be done from home. At the same time, it has added ed...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Prepare for large wage cuts if you are younger and work in a small firm

The COVID-19 pandemic is turning into a global recession - probably the biggest drop in economic activity since the Great Depression of the 1930s. This column uses over 3 million earnings observations drawn from more tha...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Labor demand in the past, present and future

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, technological change has led to the automation of existing tasks and the creation of new ones, as well as the reallocation of labor across occupations and industries. The...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Technology can benefit a few superstar workers, at the expense of everyone else

The rollout of television provides a natural experiment, creating an opportunity to isolate the impact of a technical disruption on the labour market, writes Felix Koenig....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Automating labor: evidence from firm-level patent data

Do higher wages lead to more automation innovation? To answer this question, we first introduce a new measure of automation by using the frequency of certain keywords in patent text to identify automation innovations in ...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

Post-Compulsory Education Pathways and Labour Market Outcomes

We employ sequence analysis techniques to evaluate the myriad of different pathways individuals take through the education system into the labour market. Using data from the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England ...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

The fall of the labor share and the rise of superstar firms

The fall of labor's share of GDP in the United States and many other countries in recent decades is well documented but its causes remain uncertain. Existing empirical assessments typically rely on industry or macro data...Read more...

CEP election analysis

#GE2019Economists: the research evidence on key issues for voters in the 2019 UK General Election

The general election of 2019 was called after negotiations over how the UK should leave the European Union became increasingly tortuous. While Brexit may have been the trigger for the election, it was far from being the ...Read more...

CEP election analysis

The labour market

The UK labour market, at first glance, seems to be playing at Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Employment (in terms of both levels and rates) is at record highs, yet wage growth has been extraordinarily weak. One view is that thes...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief...The long-term effects of financial distress in childhood

Is there a relationship between childhood circumstances and outcomes later in life? Andrew Clark and colleagues consider the cognitive and non-cognitive consequences for young adults whose families experienced major fina...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Between communism and capitalism: long-run inequality in Poland

How has inequality in Poland evolved between communism and capitalism to reach one of the highest levels in Europe today? Pawel Bukowski and Filip Novokmet chart a century of data on Polish inequality, 1892-2015, to exam...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...

CEP discussion paper

When income effects are large: labor supply responses and the value of welfare transfers

I estimate the long-run income effect of welfare transfers on individual labor supply. Using Italian administrative data on the universe of survivor insurance recipients, I implement a regression discontinuity design aro...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Can economic incentives promote a more equal gender division of house chores?

Gender identity norms such as the male bread-winner model are possible drivers of persistent gender inequalities in the labour market. However, the extent to which they restrict the behaviour of couples is debated. While...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

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...

CEP discussion paper

Ease versus noise: long-run changes in the value of transport (dis)amenities

For a complete cost-benefit analysis of durable infrastructures, it is important to understand how the value of non-market goods such as transit time and environmental quality changes as incomes rise in the long-run. We ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Between communism and capitalism: long-term inequality in Poland, 1892-2015

How has Polish inequality evolved between communism and capitalism to reach one of the highest levels in Europe today? To address this question, we construct the first series on the long-term distribution of income in Po...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Technology gaps, trade and income

This paper studies the origins and consequences of international technology gaps. I develop an endogenous growth model where R&D efficiency varies across countries and productivity differences emerge from firm-level tech...Read more...

Journal article

Review of Income and Wealth:

Neighbors' Income, Public Goods, and Well-Being

Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trainspotting: 'good jobs', training and skilled immigration

While skilled immigration ceteris paribus provides an immediate boost to GDP per capita by adding to the human capital stock of the receiving economy, might it also reduce the number of ’good jobs’, i.e. those with train...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Childhood circumstances and young adulthood outcomes: the role of mothers' financial problems

We here consider the cognitive and non-cognitive consequences on young adults of growing up with a mother who reported experiencing major financial problems. We use UK data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The urban wage premium in imperfect labour markets

Using administrative data for West Germany, this paper investigates whether part of the urban wage premium stems from fierce competition in thick labour markets. We first establish that employers possess less wage-settin...Read more...

Journal article

Quantitative Economics:

Incidence, salience, and spillovers: the direct and indirect effects of tax credits on wages

Tax credits are a popular way to alleviate in-work poverty. A common empirical assumption is that the benefit of the tax credit is borne solely by the claimant workers. However, economic theory suggests no particular rea...Read more...

Journal article

Travail et Emploi:

Polarization(s) in Labour Markets: Synthesis and Perspectives

Polarization is now well established and documented. The increase in the share of high-wage and low-wage jobs at the expense of "intermediate" jobs has led to a polarization of jobs in the US (Autor, 2010; Autor, Dorn, 2...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Apprenticeships in England: what do we know?

Increasing the quantity and quality of apprenticeships is high on the policy agenda in England. Research on this issue is a central focus of the Centre for Vocational Education Research (CVER). Sandra McNally summarises ...Read more...

CEP industrial strategy paper

Apprenticeships in England: what does research tell us?

Read more...

CVER Briefing Note

Apprenticeships in England: what does research tell us?

Read more...

Journal article

Renewal:

‘The Everyday Economy’ and the next economic settlement

Review of Rachel Reeves, The Everyday Economy, 2018, https://www.scribd.com/document/374425087/Rachel-Reeves-TheEveryday-Economy...Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

Unfairness at work: Well-being and quits

We here consider the effect of the level of income that individuals consider to be fair for the job they do, which we take as measure of comparison income, on both subjective well-being and objective future job quitting....Read more...

Journal article

Regional Science and Urban Economics:

You've come a long way, baby. Husbands’ commuting time and family labour supply

This paper explores the effects of husbands’ commuting time on wives’ employment and family time allocation. We develop a unitary family model, and we show that when market services are imperfect substitutes of home prod...Read more...

CentrePiece article

How 'local' are local labour markets?

If we want to create jobs in disadvantaged local areas, the idea of ‘local’ needs to be revisited. Alan Manning and Barbara Petrongolo explain the problem of thinking of geographical space as non-overlapping single labou...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Is there a payoff to apprenticeships for young people?

As part of an effort to transform the UK’s post-16 educational landscape, the government is aiming for a massive increase in the number of apprenticeships. Research by Chiara Cavaglia, Sandra McNally and Guglielmo Ventur...Read more...

Journal article

American Journal of Health Economics:

Do you have to win it to fix it?: A longitudinal study of lottery winners and their health-care demand

We exploit lottery wins to investigate the effects of exogenous changes to individuals' income on the utilization of health-care services, and the choice between private and public health care in the United Kingdom. Our ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Special economic zones and WTO compliance: evidence from the Dominican Republic

Special economic zones (SEZ), one of the most important instruments of industrial policy used in developing countries, often impose export share requirements (ESR). That is, firms located in SEZ are required to export mo...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Highways, Market Access and Spatial Sorting

We design a spatial model featuring workers embodied with heterogeneous skills. In equilibrium, locations with improved market access become relatively more attractive to the high-skilled, high-income earners. We then em...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Gender and promotions: evidence from academic economists in France

The promotion system for French academic economists provides an interesting environment to examine the promotion gap between men and women. Promotions occur through national competitions for which we have information bot...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Matching Firms and Workers in a Field Experiment in Ethiopia

Do matching frictions affect youth employment in developing countries? We organise job fairs in Addis Ababa, to match firms with a representative sample of young, educated job-seekers. We create very few jobs: one for ap...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The productivity slowdown and the declining labor share: a neoclassical exploration

We explore the possibility that a global productivity slowdown is responsible for the widespread decline in the labor share of national income. In a neoclassical growth model with endogenous human capital accumulation a ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief...Career opportunities

Students’ decisions about their education can be improved by providing them with more information, according to a report by Sandra McNally, which surveys the latest evidence on what advice is on offer and what works. She...Read more...

CEP election analysis

The NHS and Social Care: Prospects for Funding, Staffing and Performance into the 2020s

Health featured prominently in the 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union (EU), with the Leave campaign’s claim that Brexit would mean that £350 million extra money per week could be transferred fro...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Real Wages and Living Standards in the UK

Since the global financial crisis of 2007/08, workers’ real wages and family living standards in the UK have suffered to an extent unprecedented in modern history. Real wages of the typical (median) worker have fallen by...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The fall of the labor share and the rise of superstar firms

The fall of labor's share of GDP in the United States and many other countries in recent decades is well documented but its causes remain uncertain. Existing empirical assessments typically rely on industry or macro data...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...

CEP discussion paper

Concentrating on the fall of the labor share

In this paper, we discuss an explanation for the fall in share of labour in GDP based on the rise of “superstar firms.” If globalization or technological changes advantage the most productive firms in each industry, prod...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

Labour Market Returns to Vocational Qualifications in the Labour Force Survey

This report uses data from the Labour Force Survey covering the period 1997-2015, to estimate wage premiums, or returns, to acquiring vocational qualifications. Different specifications of the wage equations are estimate...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The loss of production work: evidence from quasi-experimental identification of labour demand functions

This paper examines changes in the structure of labour demand in plant-level panel data. I exploit variation in wages across local labour markets induced by the collapse of Finland’s Soviet-dependent industry in the earl...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Brexit and the UK labour market

Following the referendum vote to leave the European Union, the UK faces a trade-off between retaining access to the Single Market and restricting free movement of labour. Barbara Petrongolo considers the likely impact of...Read more...

CEP Brexit analysis

BREXIT 2016: policy analysis from the Centre for Economic Performance

On June 23rd, the British people will vote in a referendum over whether or not to remain in the European Union. It is the most important vote that most of us will have in our lifetimes. And one that will have major reper...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

No one would be spared: how the costs of Brexit would be distributed across households

That leaving the EU would damage the overall economy is now being treated as more of a fact than a speculation. But those for Brexit argue that the rich will be negatively affected while the poor will benefit. This is no...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Protectionism through exporting: subsidies with export share requirements in China

We study the effect of subsidies subject to export share requirements (ESR) - that is, conditioned on a firm exporting at least a given fraction of its output - on exports, the intensity of competition and welfare, throu...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Enabled to Work: The Impact of Government Housing on Slum Dwellers in South Africa

This paper looks at the link between housing conditions and household income and labour market participation in South Africa. I use four waves of panel data from 2002-2009 on households that were originally living in inf...Read more...

CEP real wages update

Slowing UK Wage Growth

We have previously examined the path of nominal and real wages in the UK (Blanchflower and Machin, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c). In that work, we expressed the view that in recent years there has been sufficient slack in the lab...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Top incomes and human well-being around the world

The share of income held by the top 1 percent in many countries around the world has been rising persistently over the last 30 years. But we continue to know little about how the rising top income shares affect human wel...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Wage stagnation and the legacy costs of employment

Although UK real wages have been stagnant for over a decade, there has been a notable increase in nonwage compensation. But as Brian Bell reveals, this rise consists largely of special payments to fund deficit gaps in '...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Offshoring and the Geography of Jobs in Great Britain

This paper investigates the impact of the offshoring of production activities on domestic jobs in Great Britain. The paper considers both the spatial heterogeneity across local labour markets and variations in the intens...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Role of Education for Amenity Based Sorting in British Cities

This paper investigates the relation between amenities and skills by looking at the sorting behavior of skilled individuals across neighbourhoods within British cities. Using a detailed micro dataset on housing transacti...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Consumption smoothing and the welfare cost of uncertainty

What is the effect of income uncertainty on individual well-being? Combining individual-level panel data from rural Ethiopia with high-resolution meteorological data, we estimate that mean-preserving increases in rainfal...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Top Rate of Income Tax

The main political parties disagree about the appropriate rate of income Tax on the highest incomes. This note lays out the economic principles surrounding the top rate of income tax and considers the evidence that high ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Moving People with Ideas - Innovation, Inter-regional Mobility and Firm Heterogeneity

This paper looks at the link between inter-regional mobility, innovation and firms’ behavioural heterogeneity in their reliance on localised external sources of knowledge. By linking patent data (capturing inventors’ int...Read more...

CEP election analysis

The Economic Performance of UK Cities: Can Urban and Regional Policy Make a Difference to the North-South Divide

There are large variations in economic performance across UK cities and on some measures, they have widened since the global financial crisis. All main parties promise action to reduce them, but there is little differenc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do you have To win it to fix it? A longitudinal study of lottery winners and their health care demand

We exploit lottery wins to investigate the effects of exogenous changes to individuals' income on health care demand in the United Kingdom. This strategy allows us to estimate lottery income elasticities for a range of h...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Immigration and the UK Labour Market

During periods of strong economic growth, migration is and has always been important for filling gaps in the labour market. Perceptions do not seem to line up with the existing academic evidence. On balance, the evidence...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trust and racial income inequality: evidence from the U.S.

Existing studies of trust formation in U.S. metropolitan areas have found that trust is lower when there is more income inequality and greater racial fragmentation. I add to this literature by examining the role of incom...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Adaptation to Poverty in Long-Run Panel Data

We consider the link between poverty and subjective well-being, and focus in particular on potential adaptation to poverty. We use panel data on almost 54,000 individuals living in Germany from 1985 to 2012 to show first...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Employment and Technological Change: On the Geography of Labour Market Adjustments

This paper investigates the impact of technological change on local labour market outcomes in Britain. Using a newly assembled panel database for the period 2000-2007 and a directly observed measure of technological chan...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Employee Stock Purchase Plans - Gift or Incentive? Evidence from a Multinational Corporation

Many large listed firms offer workers the opportunity to buy shares in the firm at discounted rates through employee stock purchase plans (ESPP). The discounted rate creates a gift exchange, where the firm hopes that wor...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Fiat Chrysler and the future of industry

Machines cannot fully replace people even in a high-tech industry like car-making. That is one of the conclusions of research which uses the example of the newly merged transatlantic car-maker Fiat Chrysler to debunk a n...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Latin American Efficiency Gap

The average Latin American country produces about 1 fifth of the output per worker of the US. What are the sources of these enormous income gaps? I report development-accounting results for Latin America. On average Lati...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Gone for Good? Subsidies with Export Share Requirements in China: 2002-2013

This paper presents a simple model of subsidies with export share requirements (ESR) in a heterogeneous firm environment. A two-country general equilibrium version of the model with a single 100% ESR is calibrated using ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

What Happens When Employers are Free to Discriminate? Evidence from the English Barclays Premier Fantasy Football League

Research on employers’ hiring discrimination is limited by the unlawfulness of such activity. Consequently, researchers have focused on the intention to hire. Instead, we rely on a virtual labour market, the Fantasy Foot...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Biomarkers and Long-term Market Outcomes: The Case of Creatine

Using the Young Finns Study (YFS) combined with the Finnish Linked Employer-Employee Data (FLEED) we show that quantities of creatine measured in 1980 prior to labour market entry affect labour market outcomes over the p...Read more...

CEP policy analysis

Immigration, the European Union and the UK Labour Market

During periods of strong economic growth, migration is and has always been important for filling gaps in the labour market. On balance, the evidence for the UK labour market suggests that fears about adverse consequences...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Impact of Mandatory Entitlement to Paid Leave on Employment in the UK

I evaluate the impact of the UK Working Time Regulations 1998, which introduced mandatory paid holiday entitlement. The regulation gave (nearly) all workers the right to a minimum of 4 weeks of paid holiday per a year. W...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Relocation of Public Sector Workers: Evaluating a Place-based Policy

This paper investigates the local labor market impact of a UK relocation initiative, the 2014 Lyons Review. The review resulted in the dispersal of about 25,000 civil service jobs out of London and the South East towards...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Money, Well-being and Loss Aversion: Does an Income Loss Have a Greater Effect on Well-being than an Equivalent Income Gain?

Higher income is associated with greater well-being, but do income gains and losses impact on well-being differently? Loss aversion, whereby losses loom larger than gains, is typically examined with relation to decisions...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Wage growth and productivity growth: the myth and reality of 'decoupling'

Employees in the UK are not being denied their fair share of economic growth, according to research by João Paulo Pessoa and John Van Reenen. Their investigation of claims that wage growth has become ‘decoupled’ from pro...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Gender and Competition: Evidence from Academic Promotions in France

Differences in promotion across genders are still prevalent in many occupations. Recent work based on experimental evidence indicates that women participate less in or exert lower effort during contests. We exploit the u...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Decoupling of Wage Growth and Productivity Growth? Myth and Reality

It is widely believed that in the US wage growth has fallen massively behind productivity growth. Recently, it has also been suggested that the UK is starting to follow the same path. Analysts point to the much faster gr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Intergenerational Persistence in Income and Social Class: The Impact of Within-Group Inequality

Family income is found to be more closely related to sons’ earnings for a cohort born in 1970 compared to one born in 1958. This result is in stark contrast to the finding on the basis of social class; intergenerational ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Urban Escalators and Inter-regional Elevators: The Difference that Location, Mobility and Sectoral Specialisation make to Occupational Progression

This paper uses evidence from the (British) Longitudinal Study to examine the influence on occupational advancement of the city-region of residence (an escalator effect) and of relocation between city-regions (an elevato...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Winning Big But Feeling No Better? The Effect of Lottery Prizes on Physical and Mental Health

We use British panel data to determine the exogenous impact of income on a number of individual health outcomes: general health status, mental health, physical health problems, and health behaviors (drinking and smoking)...Read more...

CEP report

The UK productivity and jobs puzzle: does the answer lie in labour market flexibility?

GDP per worker fell for the five years after 2008 which is unprecedented in post war UK history. In this paper we argue that “capital shallowing” (i.e. the fall in the capital-labour ratio) could be the main reason for t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Marginal Income Effect of Education on Happiness: Estimating the Direct and Indirect Effects of Compulsory Schooling on Well-Being in Australia

Many economists and educators favour public support for education on the premise that education improves the overall well-being of citizens. However, little is known about the causal pathways through which education shap...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Where the Streets Have a Name: Income Comparisons in the US

This paper analyses how neighbors' income affect agents' well-being using unprecedented data from the BRFSS and the City of Somerville. We conduct a multi-scale approach at the county, ZIP code and street-levels and find...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Moving Up and Sliding Down: An Empirical Assessment of the Effect of Social Mobility on Subjective Wellbeing

Many people remain in the same income group as their parents and this is a cause of much discussion and some concern. In this work, we examine how intergenerational mobility affects subjective wellbeing (SWB) using the B...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Has the Growth of Real GDP in the UK been Overstated because of Mis-Measurement of Banking Output?

If official figures overstated the growth of banking output in the UK in the recent boom, does this mean that GDP growth was overstated too? The answer is no. It is truer to say that if banking output was overstated then...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Sexism at work

Women have, on average, been less well-paid than men throughout history. Prior to 1900, most economic historians see the gender wage gap as a reflection of men’s greater strength and correspondingly higher productivity. ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Estimating the Influence of Life Satisfaction and Positive Affect on Later Income Using Sibling Fixed-Effects

The question of whether there is a connection between income and psychological well-being is a long-studied issue across the social, psychological, and behavioral sciences. Much research has found that richer people tend...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Driving Up Wages: The Effects of Road Construction in Great Britain

This paper estimates the effects of road construction on individual labour market outcomes using micro-data from Great Britain between 2002 and 2008. To capture these effects, I use a measure of accessibility to employme...Read more...

CEP policy analysis

Immigration and the UK Labour Market: The latest evidence from economic research

During periods of strong economic growth, migration is and has always been important for filling gaps in the labour market. On balance, the evidence for the UK labour market suggests that fears about the consequences of ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Effect of Public Sector Employment on Local Labour Markets

This paper considers the impact of public sector employment on local labour markets. Using English data at the Local Authority level for 2003 to 2007 we find that public sector employment has no identifiable effect on to...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Growth and productivity: UK economic performance since 1997

A common view is that the performance of the UK economy between 1997 and 2010 under Labour was very weak and that the current economic problems are a consequence of poor policies in this period. In this report, we analys...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Ambition, Human Capital Acquisition and the Metropolitan Escalator

This paper examines the relation between ambition, as a form of dynamic human capital, and the escalator role of high order metropolitan regions, as originally identified by Fielding (1989). It argues that occupational p...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Accounting for Big City Growth in Low Paid Occupations: Immigration and/or Service Class Consumption

Growth of 'global cities' in the 1980s was supposed to have involved an occupational polarisation, including growth of low paid service jobs. Though held to be untrue for European cities, at the time, some such growth di...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Flexible Employment and Cross-Regional Adjustment

Employment flexibility is commonly associated to greater labour mobility and thus faster cross-regional adjustments. The literature however offers very little hard evidence on this and quite limited theoretical guidance....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Left, Right, Left: Income and Political Dynamics in Transition Economies

The political left turn in Latin America, which lagged its transition to liberalized market economies by a decade or more, challenges conventional economic explanations of voting behavior. While the implications of upwar...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

How Local Are Labour Markets? Evidence from a Spatial Job Search Model

This paper uses data on very small UK geographies to investigate the effective size of local labour markets. Our approach treats geographic space as continuous, as opposed to a collection of nonoverlapping administrative...Read more...

CEP report

UK economic performance since 1997: growth, productivity and jobs

A common view is that the performance of the UK economy between 1997 and 2010 under Labour was very weak and that the current economic problems are a consequence of poor policies in this period. In this report, we analys...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Change and Persistence in the German Model of Collective Bargaining and Worker Representation

This paper depicts and examines the decline in collective bargaining coverage in Germany. Using repeat cross-section and longitudinal data from the IAB Establishment Panel, we show the overwhelming importance of behavior...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Measuring the (Income) Effect of Disability Insurance Generosity on Labour Market Participation

We analyze the employment effect of a law that provides for a 36 percent increase in the generosity of disability insurance (DI) for claimants who are, as a result of their lack of skills and of the labour market conditi...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Unequal Britain: How Real Are Regional Disparities?

Average earnings vary widely across the regions of Britain, a fact that has prompted many decades of policies aimed at reducing regional disparities. But as Henry Overman and Steve Gibbons demonstrate, such variation rev...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Step towards Valuing Utility the Marginal and Cardinal Way

Income has a direct impact on our utility as well as an indirect impact through the goods, services and life events it allows us to purchase. The indirect effect of income is not properly accounted for in existing resear...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...

CentrePiece article

In brief: Chernobyl: the long-term health and economic consequences

Hartmut Lehmann and Jonathan Wadsworth assess the long-lasting effects of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl disaster on the people of Ukraine....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Gender, Productivity and the Nature of Work and Pay: Evidence from the Late Nineteenth-Century Tobacco Industry

Women have, on average, been less well-paid than men throughout history. Prior to 1900, most economic historians see the gender wage gap as a reflection of men’s greater strength and correspondingly higher productivity. ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Impact of Chernobyl on Health and Labour Market Performance

Using longitudinal data from Ukraine we examine the extent of any long-lasting effects of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl disaster on the health and labour market performance of the adult workforce. The variation i...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Post-16 Educational Choices and Institutional Value Added at Key Stage 5

Childcare costs are often viewed as one of the biggest barriers to work, particularly among lone parents on low incomes. Children in England are eligible to attend free part-time nursery classes (equivalent to pre-kinder...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Long Term Impacts of Migration in British Cities: Diversity, Wages, Employment and Prices

British cities are becoming more culturally diverse, with migration a main driver. Is this growing diversity good for urban economies? This paper explores, using a new 16-year panel of UK cities. Over time, net migration...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics:

Minimum wages and firm profitability

We study the impact of minimum wages on firm profitability, exploiting the changes induced by the introduction of a UK national minimum wage in 1999. We use pre-policy information on the distribution of wages to implemen...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Real Earnings Disparities in Britain

This report estimates housing-cost-earnings differentials across labour market areas in Britain. We show that quality-adjusted housing costs rise on average, one for one with the skill-adjusted earnings of the average wo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Did Vietnam Veterans Get Sicker in the 1990s? The Complicated Effects of Military Service on Self-Reported Health

The veterans disability compensation (VDC) program, which provides a monthly stipend to disabled veterans, is the third largest American disability insurance program. Since the late 1990s, VDC growth has been driven prim...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Individualisation and Growing Diversity of Employment Relationships

At a time when the economic recession is more severe, and trade unions are weaker, than at any time since the War, it would be unproductive to speculate about the extent to which these changes have been imposed, acquiesc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade and Labor Market Outcomes

This paper reviews a new framework for analyzing the interrelationship between inequality, unemployment, labor market frictions, and foreign trade. This framework emphasizes firm heterogeneity and search and matching fri...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Starting School And Leaving Welfare: The Impact of Public Education on Lone Parents' Welfare Receipt

Childcare costs are often viewed as one of the biggest barriers to work, particularly among lone parents on low incomes. Children in England are eligible to attend free part-time nursery classes (equivalent to pre-kinder...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Wage Disparities in Britain: People or Place?

This paper investigates wage disparities across sub-national labour markets in Britain using a newly available microdata set. The findings show that wage disparity across areas is very persistent over time. While area ef...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

The Timing of Parental Income and Child Outcomes: The Role of Permanent and Transitory Shocks

How do shocks to parental income drive adolescent human capital, including years of schooling, high school dropout, university attendance, IQ and health? A structural model decomposes household shocks into permanent and ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Industrial Structure and Child Labor: Evidence from the Brazilian Population Census

This paper uses micro data from the 1980, 1991 and 2000 population censuses to investigate the role of changes in the industry mix in accounting for the differential trends in the incidence of child work (ages 10-15) acr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Individual Voice in Employment Relationships: A Comparison Under Different Collective Voice Regimes

This article examines the relationship between individual and collective employee voice, and management-led voice (appraisal), under contrasted collective voice regimes. In the first, collective workplace voice depends o...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Geography or Economics? A Micro-Level Analysis of the Determinants of Degree Choice in the Context of Regional Economic Disparities in the UK

The importance of human capital to the economic performance of a national, regional or local economy is now well established. Labour markets are thought to reward individuals in proportion to their marginal productivity ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

To Join or Not to Join? Factors Influencing Employee Share Plan Membership in a Multinational Corporation

Many firms encourage employees to own company stock through share plans that subsidize the price at favorable rates, but even so many employees do not buy shares. Using a new survey of employees in a multinational with a...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...

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 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 discussion paper

Imperfect Competition in the Labour Market

It is increasingly recognized that labour markets are pervasively imperfectly competitive, that there are rents to the employment relationship for both worker and employer. This chapter considers why it is sensible to th...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Immigration and the UK Labour Market: The Evidence from Economic Research

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CEP discussion paper

Slip Sliding Away: Further Union Decline in Germany and Britain

This paper presents the first comparative analysis of the decline in collective bargaining in two European countries where that decline has been most pronounced. Using workplace-level data and a common model, we present ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Local Human Capital and Its Impact on Local Employment Chances in Britain

This paper examines how high human capital in a locality is associated with the employment outcomes of individuals. A probit model is used to examine how the employment probability of otherwise similar working age males ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Wage Effects from Changes in Local Human Capital in Britain

This paper examines the wage effects arising from changing local human capital in the labour market areas of Britain. Employing wage regressions, it is found that individuals’ wages are positively associated with changes...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Life satisfaction and relative income: perceptions and evidence

Using a unique dataset we study both the actual and self-perceived relationship between subjective well-being and income comparisons against a wide range of potential comparison groups, enabling us to investigate a broad...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The UK Intranational Trade Cycle

The paper uses annual data on real GDP for the UK regions and 12 manufacturing sectors to derive regional and regional/sectoral business cycles using an H-P filter. The cohesion of the cycles is examined via cross-correl...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does relative income matter? Are the critics right?

Do other peoples’ incomes reduce the happiness which people in advanced countries experience from any given income? And does this help to explain why in the U.S., Germany and some other advanced countries, happiness has ...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Education and Mobility

We show that the length of compulsory education has a causal impact on regional labour mobility. The analysis is based on a quasi-exogenous staged Norwegian school reform, and register data on the whole population. Based...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Survival of the Fittest in Cities: Agglomeration, Selection and Polarisation

Empirical studies consistently report that labour productivity and TFP rise with city size. The reason is that cities attract the most productive agents, select the best of them, and make the selected ones even more prod...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Education and Income Inequality in the Regions of the European Union

This paper provides an empirical study of the determinants of income inequality across regions of the EU. Using the European Community Household Panel dataset for 102 regions over the period 1995-2000, it analyses how mi...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 occasional paper

Assimilation of Migrants into the British Labour Market

This paper discusses the extent to which migrants to Britain have been assimilated into the workforce. Migration into Britain has increased over the last 25 years, with a big increase in inflows in recent years. The pape...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Changes in Earnings Inequality and Mobility in Great Britain 1978/9-2005/6

This paper examines changes in earnings inequality and mobility between 1978/9 and 2005/6 using a unique dataset that includes both those with secure patterns of employment and a wider group who experience periods withou...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Survival of the Fittest in Cities: Agglomeration, Selection, and Polarisation

Empirical studies consistently report that labour productivity and TFP rise with city size. The reason is that cities attract the most productive agents, select the best of them, and make the selected ones even more prod...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Labour Pooling as a Source of Agglomeration: An Empirical Investigation

We provide empirical evidence on the role of labour market pooling in determining the spatial concentration of UK manufacturing establishments. This role arises because large concentrations of employment iron out idiosyn...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Public Economics:

The marginal utility of income

In normative public economics it is crucial to know how fast the marginal utility of income declines as income increases. One needs this parameter for cost-benefit analysis, for optimal taxation and for the (Atkinson) me...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Effort and Comparison Income: Experimental and Survey Evidence

This paper considers the effect of status or relative income on work effort, combining experimental evidence from a gift-exchange game with the analysis of multi-country ISSP survey data. We find a consistent negative ef...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

How Does Shared Capitalism Affect Economic Performance in the UK?

This paper uses nationally representative linked workplace-employee data from the British 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey to examine the operation of shared capitalist forms of pay – profit-sharing and group p...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trading Places: Employers, Unions and the Manufacture of Voice

Using nationally representative workplace data for Britain we show that over the last quarter century union voice – especially union-only voice – has been associated with poorer climate, more industrial action, poorer fi...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Competition for private and state school teachers

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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

Lags and Leads in Life Satisfaction: A Test of the Baseline Hypothesis

We look for evidence of habituation in twenty waves of German panel data: do individuals, after life and labour market events, tend to return to some baseline level of well-being? Although the strongest life satisfaction...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Conflict-Induced Displacement and Labour Market Outcomes: Evidence from Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina

This study uses a longitudinal data source to study the effects of conflict-induced displacement on labour market outcomes for Bosnians in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. To account for endogeneity in the displacement s...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

The Impact of Early Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Skills on Later Outcomes

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Manpower Human Resource Lab paper

Are There Day of the Week Productivity Effects?

Despite much debate about the productivity effects of flexible working and the regulation of working hours little attention is paid to temporal variance in productivity. This paper explains why one might expect to see pr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Privatization, Entry Regulation and the Decline of Labor's Share of GDP: A Cross-Country Analysis of the Network Industries

Labor’s share of GDP in most OECD countries has declined over the last two decades. Some authors have suggested that these changes are linked to deregulation of product and labor markets. To examine this we focus on a la...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Returns to Temporary Migration to the United States: Evidence from the Mexican Urban Employment Survey

Mexican migration to the United States has been a very important issue throughout the twentieth century, and its relevance has reached unprecedented levels during the last two decades. Even though there is a huge body of...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Is Free School Meal Status a Valid Proxy for Socio-Economic Status (in Schools Research)?

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Manpower Human Resource Lab paper

Temporary Agency Workers and Workplace Performance in the Private Sector

Using nationally representative workplace data we identify the correlates of temporary agency working (TAW) in the private sector in Britain and its association with workplace labour productivity and financial performanc...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

The Value of Basic Skills in the British Labour Market

In this paper we evaluate the labour market value of basic skills in the UK, focusing on the wage and employment returns to having better literacy and numeracy skills. We draw on literacy and numeracy assessments underta...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Marginal Utility of Income

In normative public economics it is crucial to know how fast the marginal utility of income declines as income increases. One needs this parameter for cost-benefit analysis, for optimal taxation and for the (Atkinson) me...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Plant Size-Place Effect: Agglomeration and Monopsony in Labour Markets

This paper shows, using data from both the US and the UK, that average plant size is larger in denser markets. However, many popular theories of agglomeration – spillovers, cost advantages and improved match quality – pr...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

The Long Term Impacts of Compulsory Schooling: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in School Leaving Dates

This paper investigates a unique feature of the English educational system to estimate the causal effect of compulsory schooling on labour market outcomes. We examine school leaving rules that allow for discrete variatio...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Job Creation and Job Destruction in the Presence of Informal Labour Markets

Recessions and policy interventions in labour markets in developing countries are characterized not only by changes in the unemployment rate, but also by changes in the proportion of formal or protected jobs. This reallo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trends in Hours and Economic Growth

We study long-run trends in market hours of work and employment shifts across economic sectors driven by uneven TFP growth in market and home production. We focus on the structural transformation between agriculture, man...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Which Skills Matter?

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CEP occasional paper

Lisbon Five Years Later. What future for European employment and growth?

At the Lisbon summit of 2000 the European Union (EU) set an agenda for making Europe the most competitive economy in the world. The targets that were set then are unlikely to be achieved. European countries need to conce...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Unequal Effects of Liberalization: Evidence from Dismantling the License Raj in India

This paper investigates whether the effects, on registered manufacturing out- put, employment, entry and investment, of dismantling the .license raja system of central controls regulating entry and production activity in...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

From the Cradle to the Labor Market? The Effect of Birth Weight on Adult Outcomes

Lower birth weight babies have worse outcomes, both short-run in terms of one year mortality rates and longer run in terms of educational attainment and earnings. However, recent research has called into question whether...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 survey...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

You Can't Always Get What You Want: the Impact of the Jobseeker's Allowance

In 1996 the UK made major changes to its welfare system for the support of the unemployed with the introduction of the Jobseeker’s Allowance. This tightened the work search requirements needed for eligibility for benefit...Read more...

Book

Monopsony in Motion: Imperfect Competition in Labor Markets

What happens if an employer cuts wages by one cent? Much of labor economics is built on the assumption that all the workers will quit immediately. Here, Alan Manning mounts a systematic challenge to the standard model ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Accounting for Cross-Country Income Differences

Why are some countries so much richer than others? Development Accounting is a first-pass attempt at organizing the answer around two proximate determinants: factors of production and efficiency. It answers the question ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Are European Labor Markets As Awful As All That?

“The standard explanation of why advanced Europe has generated less work per adult than the US is that something is seriously amiss with EU labor markets. The theme of this piece is simple. Compared to an ideal competiti...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

Is the Medical Brain Drain Beneficial? Evidence from Overseas Doctors in the UK

The ¿beneficial brain drain¿ hypothesis suggests that skilled migration can be good for a sending country because the incentives it creates for training increase that country¿s supply of skilled labour. To work, this hyp...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Anatomy of Union Decline in Britain: 1990-1998

To what extent can the decline in British trade union density between 1990 and 1998 be attributed to declining opportunities to unionize compared to declining propensity to unionize among workers with the opportunity to ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Aggregate Growth and the Efficiency of Labour Reallocation

We consider the potential importance of labour market efficiency for aggregate growth. The idea is that efficient labour markets move workers more quickly from low to high productivity sites, thereby raising aggregate pr...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...

CEP discussion paper

Barriers and the Transition to Modern Growth

This paper studies how differences in the size of barriers to capital accumulation can account for differences in long run economic development paths. In this model barriers affect both the beginning date and the pace of...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Impact of the Labour Market on the Timing of Marriage and Births in Spain.

The main purpose of this paper is to show how the labour market affects Spanish individual fertility decisions. Spain is an interesting case due to its huge fertility decline. Our hypothesis is that precarious Spanish la...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Educational Attainment, Labour Market Institutions, and the Structure of Production

A key feature of OECD economic growth since the early 1970s has been the secular decline in manufacturing's share of GDP and the secular rise of service sectors. This paper examines the role played by relative prices, t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

One Third of the World's Growth and Inequality

This paper studies growth and inequality in China and India û two economies that account for a third of the world's population. By modelling growth and inequality as components in a joint stochastic process, the paper c...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Changes in intergenerational mobility in Britain

This paper compares and contrasts estimates of the extent of intergenerational income mobility over time in Britain. Estimates based on two British birth cohorts show that mobility appears to have fallen in a cross-cohor...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Youth-Adult Differences in the Demand for Unionisation: Are American, British, and Canadian Workers All That Different?

This paper examines demand for union membership amongst young workers in Britain, Canada and the United States. The paper benchmarks youth demands for collective representation against those of adult workers and finds th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Monopsony and the Efficiency of Labour Market Interventions

Implicit in many discussions of labour market policy is the assumption that, in the absence of interventions, the operation of the labour market is well-approximated by the perfectly competitive model. The merits or deme...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Beveridge Curve, Unemployment and Wages in the OECD from the 1960s to the 1990s - Preliminary Version

This paper is an empirical analysis of unemployment patterns in the OECD countries from the 1960s to the 1990s, looking at the Beveridge Curves, real wages as well as unemployment directly. Our results indicate the follo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Generalised Model of Monopsony

Recent research in labour economics (e.g. the work of Card and Krueger, 1995, on the impact of minimum wages) has led to renewed interest in the appropriate model to use when thinking about the labour market. But, the st...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Jobs, Workers and Changes in Earnings Dispersion

The 'fractal' nature of the rise in earnings dispersion is one of its key features and remains a puzzle. In this paper, we offer a new perspective on the causes of changes in earnings dispersion, focusing on the role o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Per Capita Income Demand for Variety, and International Trade: Linder Reconsidered

We analyse a monopolistically competitive model of international trade where goods must be consumed in indivisible amounts. The number of varieties that enter a consumer's optimal consumption bundle is increasing in the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Labour Supply, Search and Taxes

Classical labour supply theory is one of the most sophisticated parts of labour economics. Yet, there is no compelling theoretical reason to believe in an outcome on a classical labour supply curve and it is unclear whet...Read more...