Using the accurate and extensive data available in the UK New Earnings Survey, this paper investigates the extent to which nominal wages are downwardly rigid and whether such rigidity interferes with necessary real wage adjustments when inflation is low. Despite the substantial numbers of...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of unemployment patterns in the OECD countries from the 1960s to the 1990s. Our results indicate the following. First, broad movements in unemployment across the OECD can be explained by shifts in labour market institutions. Second, interactions between...

Following the fall in overall net public investment, the relative pay of most public sector workers in the United Kingdom declined sharply after the mid-1970s. For example, the relative pay of male teachers fell by over 10 percentage points from the late 1970s to the late 1980s. So has this...

Relative poverty in the UK has risen massively since 1979 mainly because of increasing worklessness, rising earnings dispersion and benefits indexed to prices, not wages. The economic force underlying this is the significant shift in demand against the unskilled. This has substantially weakened...

This paper considers three aspects of the job insecurity facing British men in the last two decades. The probability of becoming unemployed, the costs of unemployment in terms of real wage losses and the probability that the continuously employed will experience substantial real wage losses. The...

Market work per person of working age differs widely across the OECD countries and there have been some significant changes in the last forty years. How to explain this pattern? Taxes are part of the story but much remains to be explained. The story favoured by <link rid="b1">Alesina "et al." (2005) </link> is that...