This paper uses data on very small UK geographies to investigate the effective size of local labor markets. Our approach treats geographic space as continuous, as opposed to a collection of non-overlapping administrative units, thus avoiding problems of mismeasurement of local labor markets...

In a capitalist economy capitalists can sell their stake in a firm on the stock market whereas workers cannot sell their jobs. It is argued that when workers have some bargaining power this asymmetry in property rights leads to inefficiencies. The consequences of this are explored and certain...

British secondary schools moved from a system of extensive and early selection and tracking in secondary schools to one with comprehensive schools during the 1960s and 70s. Before the reform, students would take an exam at age eleven, which determined whether they would attend an academically...

This paper constructs a simple, imperfectly competitive macro model which may have single or multiple equilibria depending on whether there are constant or increasing returns to scale in production. The model can be estimated and so can be used not only to test multiple versus single equilibrium...

Immigration to the UK, particularly among more educated workers, has risen appreciably over the past 30 years and as such has raised labor supply. However studies of the impact of immigration have failed to find any significant effect on the wages of native-born workers in the UK. This is...

Women in Britain who work part-time have, on average, hourly earnings about 25% less than that of women working full-time. This gap has widened greatly over the past 30 years. This paper tries to explain this part-time pay penalty. It shows that a sizeable part of the penalty can be explained by...

There is an enormous literature on gender gaps in pay and labour market participation but virtually no literature on gender gaps in unemployment rates. Although there are some countries in which there is essentially no gender gap in unemployment, there are others in which the female unemployment...

In this paper we present an investigation of unemployment persistence in Japan, the United States and fourteen European economies. We concentrate on the sources of slow adjustment in the labour market, such as sluggishness in labour demand and persistence in the employment and wage targets of...

Labour'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 labour markets. To examine this we focus on a large quasi-experiment in the OECD: the privatization of many network...