The Welsh economy has undergone rapid structural change in recent years. This paper uses data from the New Earnings Survey to examine how earnings in Wales changed relative to those of Great Britain between 1975 and 1994. There are five main findings. First, earnings of workers in Wales have...

This paper estimattes the impact of unemployment on subsequent earnings for a large and repesentative sample of British men, 1984094. Unemploymentincidence is found to have only a temporary effect, an average earnings setback of 10% on re-engagement largely eroding over two years. The effect of...

A large literature in macroeconomics assumes a social objective function, W(pi,U), where inflation, pi, and unemployment, U, are bads. This paper provides some of the first formal evidence for such an approach. It issues data on the reported well-being levels of approximately one quarter of a...

We study the role of preferences in the process of unemployment benefit determination. Perhaps surprisingly, survey evidence for the UK suggests that both the employed and unemployed wish to see a more generous level of unemployment benefits.

We present a simple model where unemployment benefits are determined in an economy in which there is endogenous delay in finding a job so that workers desire insurance against the possibility of unemployment.

The empirical results show that changes in the job-mix across the economy, from high to low overtime jobs rather than within-job changes in the use of overtime, account for most of the apparent decline in the extent of overtime working over the 1990s. Within jobs, the GDP cycle has a significant...

This paper explores the effects of unemployment on the school enrolment decisions. A few studies that have taken up this issue in the past have produced results that are seemingly contradictory with each other. We build a model of the enrolment decision that is capable of explaining these...

Why might there be a long-run trade-off between growth and unemployment? In general equilibrium, the returns on the factors of production are interdependent. This paper develops a model where the determination of the wage is central to the evolution of these incentives. The incentive to hire...

There has been a surge in the number of employed people looking for another job in Britain in the last twenty years. In this paper we present the first time series analysis of on-the-job search. Vacancies are a significant explanatory variable in equation but unemployment is not. We interpret...

In a matching model of the labour market in which employers and job seekers have to engage in a costly serach process to create a match, we show that on-the-job search ceteris paribus reduces the unemployment outflow rate. We derive this result for two alternative assumptions as to the relative...