This report looks at trends in public sector pay and compares these with what has been happening in the private sector. We start by analysing the overall levels of public and private sector pay, including how they have evolved over recent years and the differences after accounting for the...

This paper provides estimates of the impact of higher education qualifications on the earnings of graduates in the UK by subject studied. We use data from the recent UK Labour Force Surveys which provide a sufficiently large sample to consider the effects of the subject studied, class of first...

The objective of this paper is to construct and quantitatively assess an equilibrium search model with on-the-job search and general human capital accumulation. In the model workers enter the labour market with different abilities and firms differ in their productivities. Wages are dispersed...

This paper examines empirically the relationship between under-employment and migration amongst five cohorts of graduates of Scottish higher education institutions with micro-data collected by the Higher Education Statistical Agency. The data indicate that there is a strong positive relationship...

This paper integrates two strands of literature on overskilling and disability using the 2004 British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS). It finds that the disabled are significantly more likely to be mismatched in the labour market, to suffer from a pay penalty and to have lower job...

There is much disagreement in the literature over the extent to which graduates are mismatched in the labour market and the reasons for this. In this paper we utilise the Flexible Professional in the Knowledge Society (REFLEX) data set to cast light on these issues, based on data for UK...

We examine changes in inequality in socio-emotional skills very early in life in two British cohorts born 30 years apart. We construct comparable scales using two validated instruments for the measurement of child behaviour and identify two dimensions of socio-emotional skills: 'internalising'...

The extent to which the impact of computer skills depends on how computers are used is investigated using British data from an establishment survey, cohort studies and the European E-Living survey. We examine the importance of activity and frequency of use in these various data sources. We find...

During the early Nineties the proportion of UK graduates doubled over a very short period of time. This paper investigates the effect of the expansion on early labour market attainment, focusing on over-education. We define over-education by combining occupation codes and a self-reported measure...

We examine the changing relationship between unionization and wage inequality in Canada and the United States. Our study is motivated by profound recent changes in the composition of the unionized workforce. Historically, union jobs were concentrated among low-skilled men in private sector...