We build on cross-national research to examine the relationships underlying estimates of relative intergenerational mobility in the United States and Great Britain using harmonized longitudinal data and focusing on men. We examine several pathways by which parental status is related to offspring...

We test the hypothesis that information and communication technologies (ICT) “polarize” labor markets, by increasing demand for the highly educated at the expense of the middle educated, with little effect on low-educated workers. Using data on the US, Japan, and nine European countries from...

The skill gap in geographical mobility is entirely driven by workers who report moving for a new job. A natural explanation lies in the large expected surplus accruing to skilled job matches. Just as large surpluses ease the frictions which impede job search in general, they also help overcome...

Studies of firm-level data have shown that there is a huge dispersion of productivity across firms even when industries are narrowly defined. So there is a significant opportunity for the least productive firms to catch up to the most productive. The formers’ convergence could therefore...

Contingency formulations of Human Resource Management (HRM) theory suggest that the effectiveness of HRM practices should vary across firms. This study examined whether the relationship between HRM practices and productivity in manufacturing companies is contingent upon organizational climate...

There has been a remarkable increase in wage inequality in the US, UK and many other countries over the past three decades. A significant part of this appears to be within observable groups (such as age-gender-skill cells). A generally untested implication of many theories rationalizing the...

This paper assesses whether there is a systematic difference between the accident rates of fixed term and permanent contract workers that is not just the result of a compositional effect. A pure contractual effect might exist because the short duration of the temporary contract reduces the...

This paper creates a pseudo cohort of individuals who left school in the mid-1990s, using Labour Force Survey. The extent of low achievement at school amongst this group is documented, and then the impact of such low achievement on labour force status is estimated. The main focus of the paper is...

Optimal production decisions depend on local market characteristics. This paper develops a model to explain firm labor demand and firm density across regions. Firms vary in their technology to combine imperfectly substitutable worker types, and locate across regions with distinct distributions...

This paper describes and explains some of the principal trends in the wage and skilldistribution in recent decades. There have been sharp increases in wage inequality across theOECD, beginning with the US and UK at the end of the 1970s. A good fraction of thisinequality growth is due to...