Over the past 20 years the incidence of relative poverty among Britain's children has tripled. These changes are related to increased earnings inequality, growth in the number of single (lone) parent households, and an increased share of households with children with no working adult. The Labour...

Reputation indexes of employment protection have proven popular constructs in studies of the covariation of labor market institutions and macroeconomic outcomes. Portugal occupies an unenviable rank order in such measures of the stringency of employment protection. We critique this reputation in...

This paper uses data from two British workplace surveys to examine the impact of unions on several training measures. It also evaluates the impact of unions and training on earnings and two measures of firm performance. Union effects on training emerge as fairly subtle, and are more positive...

In this paper we exploit the longitudinal element of the 1990 and 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Surveys for Britain to investigate the effect of unionism on establishment closings. Contrary to both recent U.S. research and British work using information from the earlier workplace surveys, we...

Sequential analyses of the major workplace data sets available to British researchers – the Workplace Industrial/Employee Relations Surveys (WIRS/WERS) – have revealed shifts in some previously solid relationships between union presence and a variety of establishment performance indicators....

An interesting aspect of British research on unions based on the Workplace Industrial/ Employment Relations Surveys has been the apparent shift in union impact on establishment performance in the decade of the 1990s compared with the 1980s – and the recent scramble to explain the phenomenon....

Since 1997, the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has met monthly to set the UK policy interest rate. We examine evidence of systematic patterns in exchange rate movements on MPC days over the first decade of operation of the MPC. Daily data reveal significant differences in...

We analyse in detail the factors that lead to intergenerational persistence among sons, where this is measured as the association between childhood family income and later adult earnings. We seek to account for the level of income persistence in the 1970 BCS cohort and also to explore the...

This paper offers a replication for Britain of Brown and Heywood's analysis of the determinants of performance appraisal in Australia. Although there are some important limiting differences between our two datasets - the AWIRS and the WERS - we reach one central point of agreement and one...

The present paper uses a combination of workplace and linked employee-workplace data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey and the 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey to examine the impact of unions on training incidence, training intensity/coverage, and training duration. It...