A common feature of public sector labor markets is the use of pay scales. This paper examines how the removal of pay scales impacts productivity, by exploiting a reform that compelled all schools in England to replace pay scales with school-designed performance related pay schemes. We find that...

A common feature of public sector labor markets is the use of pay scales. This paper examines how the removal of pay scales impacts productivity, by exploiting a reform that compelled all schools in England to replace pay scales with school-designed performance related pay schemes. We find that...

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...