It has been suggested in the literature that taxes and subsidies play an important role in explaining the differences in working hours across countries. In this paper I test whether public programmes for family support play a role in explaining this variation. I analyse two types of policies:...

This paper examines how the quality of formal early childhood education and care is associated with children’s background. By using different indicators of quality, the research also explored how the relationship varies depending on the way quality is measured. The analysis combines...

It is widely agreed that the early years are a particularly important time for efforts to increase social mobility, because a good deal of inequality is already apparent by the time children start school, and because children’s development may be less amenable to change after they enter...

We investigate the strategies, HR attributes and their synergies that are associated with superior performance in service SMEs using data from the UK Tourism Hospitality and Leisure (THL) sector. A major advantage of our analysis is that our sample includes information also on very small firms...

Labor market institutions, via their effect on the wage structure, affect the investment decisions of firms in labor markets with frictions. This observation helps explain rising wage inequality in the US, but a relatively stable wage structure in Europe in the 1980s. These different trends are...

Using nationally representative panel data for British private sector workplaces this paper points to the importance of distinguishing between workplace and firm size when analysing employment growth, and finds that the factors associated with growth differ markedly between single independent...

This paper centres around the question of ownership of firms and managerial competition and how these affect managers and employees’ incentives to invest in human capital. We argue that employees’ incentives in human capital investment are affected by both ownership and competition since...

This paper shows that in a non-representative agent model in which households face short selling constraints and labor income risk, in the form of both uninsurable shocks and a common aggregate component, small differences in the correlation between aggregate labor income shocks and domestic and...

This paper assesses the potential of `workplace training'' with reference to German Apprenticeship. When occupational matching is important, we derive conditions under which firms provide `optimal'' training packages. Since the German system broadly meets these conditions, we evaluate the...