Please see the CEP #ElectionEconomics report(Paper 1)and the Executive Summary (Paper 2) that cover all the election 2015 briefings, discussing the research evidence on 15 of the UK's key policy battlegrounds: immigration, austerity, real wages and living standards, productivity and business,...

The main political parties disagree about the appropriate rate of income Tax on the highest incomes. This note lays out the economic principles surrounding the top rate of income tax and considers the evidence that high earners respond to higher tax rates by working less or by taking steps to...

Models of "modern monopsony" based on job differentiation and/or search frictions seem to give employers non-negligible market power over their workers while avoiding the assumption of "classical monopsony" that employers are large in relation to the size of the labour market that many labour...

A number of papers have recently argued that men and women have different attitudes and behavioural responses to competition. Laboratory experiments suggest that these gender differences are very large but it is important to be able to map these findings into real world differences. In this...

This paper analyses the effect of a non-linear tax system on wage bargaining. The main conclusions are: an increase in the marginal income or payroll tax reduces the pre-tax wage; in the iso-elastic case, an increase in the average tax rate increases the pre-tax wage by more than the tax...

Immigration to the UK has risen in the past 10 years and has had a measurable effect on the supply of different types of labour. But, existing studies of the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born workers in the UK (e.g. Dustmann, Fabbri and Preston, 2005) have failed to find any...

This paper argues that one cannot tell a convincing story of the rise in OECD unemployment without mentioning the slowdown in productivity and real wage growth that occurred in the 1970s. It is argued that whereas most authors have regarded any effects of the slowdown on unemployment as...

It is common to hear the argument that poor labour market performance in OECD countries in recent years is the result of shifts in relative demand against less-skilled workers. But, there is much dispute about whether these trends have been occurring and, if they have, how important they are in...

This paper uses a number of economic models to suggest ways in which the mandatory pre-strike ballots introduced in the UK Trade Union Act 1984 might be expected to affect union democracy, strike activity, wage and employment.

Since the abolition of the Wages Councils in September 1993, agriculture is the only sector in the UK economy covered by any form of minimum wage legislation. This paper investigates the impact of the system of minimum wages on the level and structure of earnings and employment in agriculture....