Welfare-to-work programmes were implemented in several OECD countries during the 1990s. With these programmes, entitlement to unemployment related benefits is conditional on taking up help in finding and actively preparing for work. This paper examines empirically the employment effects of the...

The New Deal for Young People (NDYP) is one of the main components of the UK government's Welfare-to-Work strategy aimed at raising employment and reducing benefit dependency. It combines elements of an active labour market programme with a stricter benefit regime. This paper evaluates its...

Individuals acquire experience during their working lives. This is usually thought to contribute to individuals’ human capital and is rewarded in terms of pay. This paper looks at whether individuals’ pay is also affected by the general experience acquired by others working in the same firm...

It has long been argued that equality of opportunity brings business benefits and that it is in employers’ interest to implement policy to promote equality of opportunity. We present new evidence on this issue from the Workplace Employment Relations Survey 2004. There do not appear to be large...

Augmenting a Mincerian earnings function with industry level data we estimate the external return to schooling for a repeated cross-section of individuals in the UK over the period 1994-2004. We find that a one year increase in the industry average level of schooling is associated with an...

This paper considers the macroeconomic effects of the migration that followed the enlargement of the EU in May 2004. At that time the EU was expanded to include 10 New Member States (NMS) predominantly from Central and Eastern Europe. In the wake of accession the number of workers migrating to...