There is widespread concern currently that some ethnic minority communities within Britain, especially Muslim, are not following the stereotypical immigrant path of economic and cultural assimilation into British society. Indeed, many seem to have the impression that differences between Muslims...

Since the abolition of the Wages Councils in September 1993, agriculture is the only sector in the UK economy covered by any form of minimum wage legislation. This paper investigates the impact of the system of minimum wages on the level and structure of earnings in agriculture and the level and...

There is little doubt that technology has had the most profound effect on altering the tasks that wehumans do in our jobs. Economists have long speculated on how technical change affects boththe absolute demand for labour as a whole and the relative demands for different types of labour.In...

Human capital theory provides the generally accepted interpretation of the relationship between earnings and labour market experience, namely that general human capital tends to increase with experience. However, there are other plausible interpretations e.g. search models generally predict that...

Immigration to the UK has risen over time. Existing studies of the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born workers in the UK have failed to find any significant effect. This is something of a puzzle since Card and Lemieux, (2001) have shown that changes in the relative supply of...

British secondary schools moved from a system of extensive and early selection and tracking in secondary schools to one with comprehensive schools during the 1960s and 70s. Before the reform, students would take an exam at age eleven, which determined whether they would attend an academically...

This paper constructs a simple, imperfectly competitive macro model which may have single or multiple equilibria depending on whether there are constant or increasing returns to scale in production. The model can be estimated and so can be used not only to test multiple versus single equilibrium...

Most models of wage determination are static. This paper analyzes a simple dynamic model of collective bargaining and argues that this provides insights into the determinants of wage pressure that a static model cannot provide. In particular, it is shown how the length of labor contracts and the...

Recent work on the economic effects of minimum wages has stressed that the standard economic model, where increases in minimum wages depress employment, is not supported by the empirical findings in some labour markets. In this paper we present a theoretical framework which is general enough to...