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. Search models, for example, generally...

This paper attempts to construct a model of the economic effects of the introduction of prestrike ballots in the Employment Act (1984). It argues that strike ballots tend to reduce union influence over issues that affect different workers in different ways (like plant closures) and will do...

Economists have a well-developed theory of value but the theory of why people hold the values they do is rudimentary at best. In spite of the fact that it is common to argue that values are important, most work on values is normative and the positive theory of values is relatively under-...

There is a lot of evidence that identity matters for behavior. There is a widespread belief that societies will function better if they manage to establish a common sense of identity among the population. And there are also contemporary fears that this common identity is threatened in several...

This paper is a study of the process by which employers in five relatively low-wage British firms fill vacancies. It studies the determinants of the number and quality of applicants, the way in which these applicants are selected for interviews and offered jobs. The main conclusions are that the...

The UK Equal Pay Act of 1970 resulted in a large rise in the relative earnings of women in the early 1970s. As this change (unlike most wage changes) was largely exogenous to employers, one can think of this episode as an experiment for testing different theories of the labour market. Hence,...

This paper proposes a one-dimensional index for the gap between the demand and supply of skills; this index can be estimated based on the labour market performance of groups defined with characteristics (e.g. education) that are only imperfectly correlated with labour market skills. Using data...

There is an enormous literature on gender gaps in pay and labour market participation but virtually no literature on gender gaps in unemployment rates. Although there are some countries in which there is essentially no gender gap in unemployment, there are others in which the female unemployment...