Group 1 metal and chemical industries formed the essential suppliers of British war materials during WW2. Their industrial sectors covered metal manufacture, general and electrical engineering, vehicle production, aircraft production, shipbuilding, metal goods, chemicals and explosives, and...

We show that the distinction between job spells and employer spells matters for returns to tenure. Employer spells encompass between-job wage movements linked to promotions or demotions while job spells don't. Using a 1% sample of the British workforce over the period 1975-2010, we find that a...

Using the British New Earnings Survey Panel Data from 1980 to 2001, this paper examines male and female real wage cyclicality. Estimation is undertaken separately for job stayers and job movers. A unique data advantage compared to earlier studies is that movers are defined by job changes both...

Based on the methodology of Beaudry and DiNardo (1991), this paper investigates the relative importance of the spot market and implicit contracts in the determination of British real wages. Empirical work is carried out separately for males and females with individuallevel data taken from the...

On their intensive margins, firms in the British engineering industry adjusted to the severe falls in demand during the 1930s Depression by cutting hours of work. This provided an important means of reducing labour input and marginal labour costs, through movements from overtime to short-time...

In the time domain, the observed cyclical behavior of the real wage hides a range of economic influences that give rise to cycles of differing lengths and amplitudes. This may serve to produce a distorted picture of wage cyclicality. Here, we employ frequency domain methods that allow us...

We show that U.S. manufacturing wages during the Great Depression were importantly determined by forces on firms' intensive margins. Short-run changes in work intensity and the longer-term goal of restoring full potential productivity combined to influence real wage growth. By contrast, the...

The British engineering industry experienced extreme production and employment pressures during the rearmament period that preceded the Second World War and in the early war years. Did it react by placing a greater emphasis on incentive-compatible payment methods? This paper examines the...

Using the British New Earnings Survey Panel Data (NESPD) for the period 1975 to 2001 we estimate the wage cyclicality of job stayers (those remaining within single jobs in a given company), within company job movers, and between company job movers. We also examine how the proportion of internal...

This paper investigates the relative cyclical behavior of the pay of piece workers and hourly paid workers. It uses a unique data set of blue-collar workers in British engineering between 1926 and 1966. The statistics are obtained from the payrolls of firms belonging to the Engineering Employers...