In this paper we offer new evidence on the impact of British privatisations on wages in five selected industries: gas, electricity, water supply, railways and air transport. For the above sectors we construct long time-series of different measures of labour earnings, spanning from 1970 to 2002,...

As in many other countries, government policy in the UK has the objective of raising the participation rate of young people in higher education, while increasing the share of the costs of higher education paid by students themselves. A rationale for the latter element comes from evidence of a...

Although past research has established the existence of strong social class effects on the decision to undertake higher education in the UK, there is only sparse empirical work investigating social class influences on the choice of degree subject at the undergraduate level. We estimate trinomial...

Estimates of a high average return to a degree for UK graduates have provided a policy rationale for increasing the share of the costs of higher education borne by UK students over recent decades. We use evidence from a cohort of people born in 1970 to estimate hourly wage returns to a...

Assessing the welfare impact of a policy on the scale of the British privatisation programme is a daunting task. Four sets of issues raised in the impressive study by Florio et al of the British privatisation programme merit further discussion. One such set of issues relates to the different...