UK government policy encourages mothers of young children in low-income families to enter or return to work, via tax credit subsidies and support for childcare. Maternal employment is seen a central plank in the campaign against child poverty, both because it raises income immediately and...

In recent years, British labour markets have been characterised by a decline of institutional regulation of entry routes into many occupations and internal labour markets. This paper examines this change by comparing occupational labour markets for selected occupations in which institutional...

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...

Informal contacts are extensively used by both firms and workers to find jobs and fill vacancies. The common wisdom in the economic literature is that jobs created through this channel are of better quality and pay higher wages than jobs created through formal methods. This paper explores the...

The paper uses two data sources to map trends in resource availability for trade unions in Britain. Union resources exist on the one hand in the form of subscription income and accumulated assets shown in union accounts and, on the other, establishment level resources provided by employers and...

In this paper we estimate the sorting effects of university degree class on initial labor market outcomes using a regression discontinuity design that exploits institutional rules governing the award of degrees. Consistent with anecdotal evidence, we find sizeable and significant effects for...

Overall, collective bargaining coverage has dropped by around fourteen percentage points. This paper investigates the causes and consequences of the decline in collective bargaining in Britain between 1990 and 1998. One in three workplaces that practiced collective bargaining in 1990 had...

In this paper we examine the causal impact of competition on management quality. We analyze the hospital sector where geographic proximity is a key determinant of competition, and English public hospitals where political competition can be used to construct instrumental variables for market...

Common wisdom states that teenage childbearing reduces schooling, labour market experience and adult wages. However, the decisions to be a teenage mother, to quit school, and be less attached to the labour market might all stem from some personal or family characteristics. Using the National...

In this paper we revisit the gender decomposition of wages in the presence of selection bias. We show that when labor market participation decisions of couples are not independent, the sample selection corrections used in the literature have been incomplete (incorrect). We derive the appropriate...