This paper investigates transitions into and out of low pay in Britain in the 1990s. It finds considerable persistence in low pay. In addition, the low paid are more likely to move into non-employment; those entering employment from a spell outside are more likely to be low paid; and those who...

In this paper we incorporate staggered wage setting a la Taylor (1979) into an optimizing dynamic general equilibrium framework. The aim is to study whether staggered wages could induce a high degree of persistence in the real effects of money shocks, as some recent studies have suggested.

We study the output costs of a reduction in monetary growth in a dynamic general equilibrium model with staggered wages. The money wage is fixed for two periods, and is chosen according to intertemporal optimization. Agents have labour market monopoly power. We show that the introduction of...

The paper considers the estimation of wage differentials both between and within public and private sector labour markets, employing data from the 1991 BHPS. When controlling for a range of individual and job characteristics, including industry affiliation, the mean differential is estimated at...

The paper develops an efficiency-wage model, where input prices affect the equilibrium rate of unemployment. We show that a simple framework based on only two prices (the real price of oil and the real rate of interest) is able to explain the main post-war movements in the rate of US...

The paper studies commuting in Great Britain in the 1990s. The average one-way commute to work is now 38 minutes in London, 33 minutes in the south-east, and 21 minutes in the rest of the country. There are three other findings. First, commuting times are especially long among the highly...

This paper uses a unique panel data at the level bargaining group to examine aspects of 'right-to manage' models of wage determination. Empirical measures of firms' and unions' bargaining power are identified and found to be important influences on wage setting.

We exploit rare information on the union status of both individual employees and of their workplaces to address two related issues. First, we find a positive effect of workplace trade union density on the level of the individual's pay. Second, we find that the individual's unions membership...