Wal-Mart matters to the form and substance of law and social reform in several distinct ways. This article describes Wal-Mart as serving three key purposes - as target, symbol, and model - in the contemporary social reform landscape. First, Wal-Mart, the largest employer in the United States is...

This article presents and explores a rich new data source to analyse the determinants of pay and job rank amongst academic Economists in the UK. Characteristics associated with individual productivity and workplace features are found to be important determinants of the relative wage and...

This article presents and explores a rich new data source to analyse the determinants of pay and job rank amongst academic Economists in the UK. Characteristics associated with individual productivity and workplace features are found to be important determinants of the relative wage and...

An individual?s human capital has a strong influence on earnings. Yet individual, worker-level estimations of earnings rarely include the characteristics of co-workers or detailed firm-level controls. In this paper, we use a unique matched worker?workplace dataset to estimate the effect on own...

This paper examines the disincentive effects of perceived underpayment on individuals? exerted effort and promotion. To this end we develop a theoretical framework and obtain empirical evidence by analysing British academia data. We find that, tenured academics will tend to invest less effort in...

On almost all measures of physical health, Scots fare worse than residents of any other region of the UK and often worse than the rest of Europe. Deaths from chronic liver disease and lung cancer are particularly prevalent in Scotland. The self-assessed wellbeing of Scots is lower than that of...

Occupational segregation and pay gaps by gender remain large while many of the constraints traditionally believed to be responsible for these gaps have weakened over time. Here, we explore the possibility that women and men have different tastes for the content of the work they do. We run...

We consider the extent to which societal shifts have been responsible for an increased tendency for females to sort into traditional male roles over time, versus childhood factors. Drawing on three cohort studies, which follow individuals born in the UK in 1958, 1970 and 2000, we compare the...

An individual's human capital has a strong influence on earnings. Yet individual, worker-level estimations of earnings rarely include the characteristics of co-workers or detailed firm-level controls. In this paper, we use a unique matched worker-workplace dataset to estimate the effect on own...

This paper summarizes evidence for the existence of a wage curve a downward-sloping relationship between the level of pay and the local unemployment rate in modern micro data. At the time of writing, the curve has been found in 40 nations. Its elasticity is approximately -0.1. -- wage...