Recent theoretical developments relating to investment under uncertainty have highlighted the importance of irreversibility for the timing of investment expenditures and their expected returns. This has subsequently stimulated a growing empirical literature which examines uncertainty and...

There are two findings that are conspicuous in almost all studies of individual wage determination. First, standard cross-section wage equations rarely account for more than half of the total variance in earnings between individuals. Second, there are large and persistent inter-industry wage...

Switching from one job to another would appear to be an important part of an individual's experience within the labour market. In Britain, approximately one in three workers are observed changing jobs over a three year period. Models of voluntary job mobility predict that in the long run,...

Raising the quality of education has been one of the main objectives of the current government in Britain. By devoting more resources to the education sector, it is expected that pupils will achieve higher educational attainment by the time their years of compulsory schooling ends. This study...

Evidence from previous studies suggest that part of the observed wage differential between males and females is due to the spells of non-participation experienced by women. During these career breaks, no new investment in human capital occurs and the existing stock of skills depreciates, placing...

Effort-biased technological change and other explanations for work intensification are investigated. It is hypothesised that technological and organizational changes are one important source of work intensification and supportive evidence is found using establishment data for Britain in the...

This paper shows that employability strongly moderates the effects of unemployment and of job insecurity on well-being. I develop a simple framework for employment insecurity and employability with two key features. First, it allows for the risks surrounding unemployment and employment...

Job security is an important aspect of work quality. Accumulating evidence shows that insecurity has deleterious impacts on individuals and households, and in the mid-1990s, job insecurity became a public and political issue. This paper critically examines the concept and measurement of job...

I investigate possible explanations for work intensification, using four British data sets. I conjecture that an important source of work intensification is effort-biased technical change (EBTC), which enhances the productivity of high effort workers relative to that of low effort workers. EBTC...

We investigate the impact of trade liberalization on wages and the returns to education in Brazil. Our pseudo-panel estimates of the returns are significantly lower than OLS estimates, signifying omitted ability bias in traditional cross-section estimated returns in developing countries. Trade...