Real wages and living standards have taken a hard hit in the UK in the recent past. Real wages of the typical (median) UK worker have fallen by almost 10% since 2008 and median family incomes have significantly fallen for working age households. This recent experience is weaker than in the...

What is the impact of a pupil's perceptions of how their teachers will treat them on their motivation, efforts and educational achievements? To explore this question, Amine Ouazad and Lionel Page have conducted an experiment in which school children could use pocket money to place small bets on...

In recent years there has been an increase in the number of children going to school in England who do not speak English as a first language. We investigate whether this has an impact on the educational outcomes of native English speakers at the end of primary school. We show that the negative...

Although the economic recovery in the UK has been disappointing, it is inappropriate to either assert that Japan's two lost decades illustrate the ineffectiveness of stimulative monetary policy or that the UK is predestined to perform as badly as Japan. Recall that the UK has, so far, avoided...

Information provision is an important part of all mechanisms which give employees voice atwork. This paper considers the law on information disclosure for joint consultation andcollective bargaining in three countries, Germany, France, and the UK, chosen for theirdistinctive legal and...

A central concern about immigration is the integration into the labour market, not only of the first generation, but also of subsequent generations. Little comparative work exists for Europe's largest economies. France, Germany and the United Kingdom have all become, perhaps unwittingly,...

This paper examines the importance of social and geographical networks in structuring entry into skilled occupations in premodern London. Using newly digitised records of those beginning an apprenticeship in London between 1600 and 1749, we find little evidence that networks strongly shaped...

In brief: Economics of higher education

The researchers note that there have been historically unprecedented falls in UK real wages since the start of the Great Recession. What's more, the long US experience of stagnant real wages (median real weekly earnings in the United States in 2013 were at about the same level as in 1979) might...

During periods of strong economic growth, migration is and has always been important for filling gaps in the labour market. On balance, the evidence for the UK labour market suggests that fears about adverse consequences of rising immigration in general and EU immigration in particular have...