The instability of the Beveridge curve in Britain since the mid-50s has been interpreted as revealing a deterioration of labour market effectiveness in matching vacancies to unemployed job-seekers. This paper attemps to repeat the stability analysis of the matching technology, having relaxed...

A search for key sectors in the UK economy is undertaken, in terms of those generating labour cost saving and product improvements, the effect from which spill over into the remainder of the economy.

This paper estimattes the impact of unemployment on subsequent earnings for a large and repesentative sample of British men, 1984094. Unemploymentincidence is found to have only a temporary effect, an average earnings setback of 10% on re-engagement largely eroding over two years. The effect of...

Fingold and Soskice (1988) argue that Britain is trapped in a "low-skills" equilibrium. In Redding (1996), this notion is formalized in a dynamic model which relies on strategic complementarities between firms' investments in R&D and workers' investments in human capital. In this paper, we...

This paper is a preliminary draft of a chapter for the new Handbook of Labour Economics edited by Orley Ashenfelter and David Card and Published by North Holland.

Given the increasing use of panel data in testing hypotheses about labour market behaviour, it is essential that economists have a cound grasp of the problems involved in the collection of this type of data. This paper investigates the biases generated by recall errors and panel attrition, using...

In this paper, we first present a summary of the literature dealing with the question of the existence of externalities of employer provided and funded training. Using French data, we then estimate the impact of this kind of training on wages, while paying special attention to the mobility after...

The paper attempts to synthesize the research to date on the contribution of international trade to rising income inequality in the US and to other labour-market developments in other countries. Our basic conclusion is that despite using very different methodologies, on balance most labour and...

This paper uses firm-level data to address the following issues; (i) Have wage differentials increased at the level of the firm? (ii) Are they any patterns in the levels and changes of these differentials? (iii) Do the same factors determine the pay of both low-skilled and high-skilled workers?

The impact of profitability on capital accumulation, neglected in conventional accounts, is confirmed by a cross sectional analysis of the post-war experience of manufacturing in OECD economies and this is consistent with a body of time-series and firm level studies.