A century has passed since the first call for a British national minimum wage (NMW). That remarkable Fabian tract discussed wage setting, coverage, monopsony, international labour standards, inspection and compliance and the interaction between the NMW and the social security system. The NMW was...

Research suggests that, at the levels set in countries like the US and the UK, minimum wages have little effect on employment but do have impacts on wage inequality. However we lack models that can explain these facts – this paper presents one based on imperfect labour markets. The paper also...

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...

We use a simple job search model to explain the doubling of mean hourly earnings of white males, and the five-fold increase in their variance, during the first 18 years of labor market experience. For this purpose we embody minimum wage regulations and imperfect compliance in a job search model...

This paper shows, using data from both the US and the UK, that average plant size is larger in denser markets. However, many popular theories of agglomeration – spillovers, cost advantages and improved match quality – predict that establishments should be smaller in cities. The paper...

We provide evidence on the extent of ethnic segregation experienced by children across secondary schools and neighbourhoods (wards). Using 2001 Schools Census and Population Census data we employ the indices of dissimilarity and isolation and compare patterns of segregation across nine ethnic...

This paper applies recent advances in the study of labor market dynamics to a representative developing country with a large unregulated of “informal” sector, Mexico. It finds, first, that the formal salaried sector shows the same procyclical job finding rate and mildly countercyclical...

This paper reviews the changing pattern of labour market segmentation in Britain since the mid-1970s. In the early 1980s, industrial labour markets in Britain, along with Germany, could be characterised as dominated by occupational labour markets for skilled workers compared with the...

We exploit a natural experiment provided by the 1990 introduction of the UK National Minimum Wage (NMW) to investigate the relationship between wages and monitoring and to test for Efficiency Wages considerations in a low-wage sector, the UK residential care homes industry. Our findings seem to...