The validity of the matching estimator in programme evaluation depends on the completeness of the set of variables used for matching. When an attitudinal variable is relevant for the participation decision, but is either unmeasured or measured only after entry to the programme, estimates of...

The review reported here was commissioned in 2000 by the National Audit Office as part of its evaluation of the New Deal for Young People (NDYP). Its purpose was to compare the economic impact of NDYP with those of labour market programmes elsewhere, to the extent that robust and comparable...

This paper uses the 1990-1998 Workplace Industrial Relations Survey (WIRS) Panel to analyse the impact of worker voice on workplace closure and employment growth among workplaces in Britain.

The paper estimates the union wage premium in Britain’s private sector in 1998, after nearly two decades of union decline. It examines the performance of the linear estimator alongside a semi-parametric technique (propensity score matching (PSM)) – hitherto unused in the wage premium...

Retirement is frequently a period of change, when the roles and relationships associated with individuals’ previous labour market positionings are transformed. It is also a time when personal relationships, including the marital relationship and relationships with friends and family, come...

Compared with most other EU member states, the UK has relatively low rate of recycling of household waste, and sends a relatively high proportion of disposal in landfill. Under the provisions of the EU Landfill Directive, this situation will hve to change radically in the next ten years, with...

This paper uses national survey data to measure the degree of gender discrimination in the UK labour market in the 1990s and compares this to results from earlier decades. It concludes that discrimination is still an important cause of the gender pay gap: women’s pay would increase by about 10...

Over the last two decades, there has been a major switch in British workplaces away from union voice and representative worker voice more generally, towards direct, non-union forms of voice. This paper assesses the implications of this switch for the effectiveness of worker voice, as measured by...

The research reported in this was conducted under the project The Social Impacts of Environmental Taxes: Removing Regressivity, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation under it Programme on Environment and Social Concerns. The project is investigating the social implications of environmental...

The methodological review is the second part of the evaluation research commissioned by the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) in 2005 to help in the preparation of the evaluation of the Working for Families (WFF) programme. This review enumerates the key evaluation questions identified by MSD...