The U.K. government has recently committed itself to an ambitious 80 per cent employment rate target. Recognising that achieving this aspiration will require significant numbers of the economically inactive to (re-)engage with the labour market, the government has enacted various policy reforms...

This paper uses unique data for the economically inactive to calculate elasticity estimates of the reservation wage and exit probability with respect to state benefits and the arrival rate of job offers, and finds that the inactive react in similar ways to benefit increases as the unemployed. --...

"This paper utilises the panel element of the BHPS (waves 9 to 14) to examine the dynamics of the National Minimum Wage (NMW) introduced to Britain in 1999. Specifically a persistence measure based on a random effects probit model for those affected by the NMW is constructed. The conditional...

Regional unemployment rates in Great Britain have narrowed dramatically in recent years. However, significant differences still remain in terms of both employment and economic inactivity rates, which may now better reflect relative labour market performance. This paper examines these differences...

An important policy issue is whether the National Minimum Wage (NMW) introduced in Britain in April 1999, is a stepping stone to higher wages or traps workers in a low-wage no-wage cycle. In this paper we utilise the longitudinal element of the Labour Force Survey over the period 1999 to 2003 to...