Despite its relatively small size, the private school sector plays a prominent role in British society. This paper focuses on changing wage and education differentials between privately educated and state educated individuals in Britain. It reports evidence that the private/state school wage...

We investigate the rapid influx of overseas students into UK higher education and the impact on the number of domestic students. Using administrative data since 1994/5, we find no evidence of crowd out of domestic undergraduate students and indications of increases in the domestic numbers of...

This paper presents evidence that, across many European countries, the 1990s have witnessed an intensification of labour effort, and investigates explanations for this process. Using data drawn from The European Survey on Working Conditions, we construct an index of work effort and show that it...

This paper reports results from a recent survey we conducted on the union status of over 650 firms in the private sector of the UK. Compared to earlier periods, the survey shows that since 1997 there has been a slight fall in derecognition, but a relatively large increase in union recognition....

One of the most striking features of European labour markets is the high incidence of long-term unemployment. In this paper we review the literature on its causes and consequences. Our main conclusions are that: the rise in the incidence of long-term unemployment has been ''caused'' by a...

There are no problems of graduate over-supply or over-qualification,according to Stephen Machin and Sandra McNally

This paper investigates whether young people whose fathers are union members are themselves more likely to join a union. We find that young people with unionized fathers are twice as likely to be unionized as those with non-union fathers and that this rises to three times higher for those whose...

Do resources matter? This question remains controversial in the economics of education as many studies find no relationship between school resources and educational outcomes. Yet, improving educational performance, especially of ‘hard to reach’ children, is a key area for government policy....

In this paper we investigate whether young people whose fathers are union members are themselves more likely to join a union. The work builds upon a large social science literature on intergenerational mobility that, to our knowledge, has not been applied to industrial relations questions. The...

This paper considers to what extent union decline in Britain has been characterised by convergence or divergence in union membership rates for people with different personal and job characteristics. It compares data on individual union membership in 1975, from a period when union membership was...