After shrinking dramatically during World War Two the gender wage gap (GWG) narrowed again in the early 1970s due to the Equal Pay Act. The GWG has closed across birth cohorts at all points in the adult life-cycle but remains. Within birth cohort it rises to middle age before falling again....

This paper draws attention to an increase in the size of the union membership wage premium in the UK public sector relative to the private sector. We find the public sector membership wage premium is approximately double that in the private sector controlling for a full range of individual, job...

Trade unions have transformed from male-dominated organisations rooted in manufacturing to majority-female organisations serving predominantly white-collar workers, often in the public sector. Adopting a comparative case study approach using nationally representative linked employer-employee...

Using data tracking all those born in a single week in Great Britain in 1958 through to their mid-50s we observe an inverse U-shaped gender wage gap (GWG) over their life-course: an initial gap in early adulthood widened substantially during childrearing years, affecting earnings in full-time...

Using matched employer-employee data from the 2004 and 2011 Workplace Employment Relations Surveys (WERS) for Britain we find a raw gender wage gap (GWG) in hourly wages of around 0.18-0.21 log points. The regression-adjusted gap is around half that. However, the GWG declines substantially with...

Using nationally representative linked employer-employee data we find one-quarter of employees in Britain are paid for performance. The log hourly wage gap between performance pay and fixed pay employees is .36 points. This falls to .15 log points after controlling for observable demographic,...

Using data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) we show performance pay (PP) increased earnings dispersion among men and women, and to a lesser extent among full-time working women, in the decade of economic growth which ended with the recession of 2008. PP was also associated with...

This paper links data on establishments and individuals to analyze the role of establishments in the increase in inequality that has become a central topic in economic analysis and policy debate. It decomposes changes in the variance of log earnings among individuals into the part due to changes...

The gender wage gap has closed gradually in the United Kingdom, as in other countries, but convergence is slower among top earners. Using linked employer-employee data over two decades we examine the gap among university Vice Chancellors who are among the most highly paid employees in the UK....

Ethnicity wage gaps in Great Britain are large and have persisted over time. Previous studies of these gaps have been almost exclusively confined to analyses of household data, so they could not account for the role played by individual employers, despite growing evidence of their wage-setting...