This paper assesses the impact of the National Minimum Wage (NMW) on employment and inequality in the UK over the decade since its introduction in 1999. Identification is facilitated by using variation in the bite of the NMW across local labour markets and the different sized year on year up...

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 previous recessions. The main reasons for this appear to be a combination of...

Recent work in psychology and economics has investigated ways in which individuals experience their lives. This literature includes influences on individuals' momentary happiness. We contribute to this literature using a new data source, Mappiness (www.mappiness.org.uk), which permits...

Happiness surveys typically ask people to say how they feel about their life experiences in retrospect, but smartphone technology makes it possible to collect responses on wellbeing 'in the moment'. The authors use this new 'Mappiness' data source to question whether we really are happy while we...

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 Wadsworth look for an explanation.

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 think of labour markets as imperfectly competitive, reviews estimates on the...

"The standard explanation of why advanced Europe has generated less work per adult thanthe US is that something is seriously amiss with EU labor markets. The theme of this piece issimple. Compared to an ideal competitive market, EU labor markets fall seriously short, butcompared to labor markets...

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, technology, factor endowments, and labour market institutions in the process...

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 demerits of particular policies is then seen as a trade-off between efficiency...

Individual and household based aggregate measures of joblessness can, and do, offer conflicting signals about labour market performance if work is unequally distributed. Thispaper introduces a simple set of indices that can be used to measure the extent of divergencebetween individual and...