Throughout the 1980s, the British unemployment compensation system was subject to a series of administrative changes. At the same time, the proportion of male unemployed workers receiving benefit fell by some twenty percentage points. Using a time series of cross-sections from the Labour Force...

This paper endogenises the job offer arrival rate in a standard search model in order to test the hypothesis that unemployment-related benefits may affect the job search behaviour of unemployed workers independently of any reservation wage effect. Using a pooled cross-section of 1484 unemployed...

This paper summarizes inequalities in PC ownership using data from the US Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) and the British General Household Survey (GHS) for the period 1984-98. Between 1988 and 1994, British households were more likely than US households to own a personal computer (PC). After...

If personal computers (PCs) are used to enhance learning and information gathering across avariety of subjects, then a home computer might reasonably be considered an input in aneducational production function. Using data on British youths from the British HouseholdPanel Survey between 1991 and...

The paper uses data from the annual British General household Survey to examine changes in the structure of weekly earnings for full-time male employees aged 16 to 64 during the period 1974-1988. The principal findings are: (1) earnings inequality fell slightly in the second half of the 1970s...

The deregulation of the system of pay determination in Britain in 1979 was intended to give employers the freedom to determine wage increases without the restriction of pay norms or statutory limits. Yet thirteen years later, despite a rise in productivity, nominal wage growth and the growth of...

Immigration to the UK has risen in the past 10 years and has had a measurable effect on the supply of different types of labour. But, existing studies of the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born workers in the UK (e.g. Dustmann, Fabbri and Preston, 2005) have failed to find any...

One important feature of labour market policy over the past 15 years has been an emphasis on promoting greater flexibility and responsiveness in wages to the fortunes of individual firms. This study analyses the patterns of persistence in British private manufacturing wage settlements using a...

The initial years of transition in the Russian Federation have been characterised by relatively smaller falls in employment than in other reform-orientated countries of eastern Europe, despite the huge negative shock caused by the move from planned to market economy. Using information from two...

This paper provides an analysis of the incidence of unemployment in Britain between 1979 and 1986. Using Labour Force Survey data, we attempt to quantify the extent to which different groups in the population are exposed to differential unemployment risk. We find strong evidence that...