This paper considers the impact of public sector employment on local labour markets. Using English data at the Local Authority level for 2003–2007 we find that public sector employment has no identifiable effect on total private sector employment. However, public sector employment does affect...

Using data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) we show performance pay (PP) increased earnings dispersion among men and women, and to a lesser extent among full-time working women, in the decade of economic growth which ended with the recession of 2008. PP was also associated with...

Immigration to the UK has risen in the past 10 years and has had a measurable effect on the supply of different types of labour. But, existing studies of the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born workers in the UK (e.g. Dustmann, Fabbri and Preston, 2005) have failed to find any...

This paper is concerned with the relationship between wages and unemployment. Using UK regions and individuals as the basis for our analysis, the following questions are investigated. First, is the wage equation a relationship between unemployment and wages or wage changes? Second, can we...

This paper assesses the potential of `workplace training' with reference to German Apprenticeship. When occupational matching is important, we derive conditions under which firms provide `optimal' training packages. Since the German system broadly meets these conditions, we evaluate the...

Tax credits have been a popular way to alleviate in-work poverty. The assumption is typically that the incidence is on the claimant workers. However, economic theory suggests no particular reason to believe that this should be the case. This paper investigates the incidence of the Working...

Labor's share of GDP in most OECD countries has declined over the last two decades. Some authors have suggested that these changes are linked to deregulation of product and labor markets. To examine this we focus on a large quasi-experiment in the OECD: the privatization of many network...

Employees in the UK are not being denied their fair share of economic growth, according to research by João Paulo Pessoa and John Van Reenen. Their investigation of claims that wage growth has become 'decoupled' from productivity growth finds that decoupling has been overstated and cannot be...