The paper uses data from the annual British General household Survey to examine changes in the structure of weekly earnings for full-time male employees aged 16 to 64 during the period 1974-1988. The principal findings are: (1) earnings inequality fell slightly in the second half of the 1970s...

Throughout the 1980s, the British unemployment compensation system was subject to a series of administrative changes. At the same time, the proportion of male unemployed workers receiving benefit fell by some twenty percentage points. Using a time series of cross-sections from the Labour Force...