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 analyses the effect of a non-linear tax system on wage bargaining. The main conclusions are: an increase in the marginal income or payroll tax reduces the pre-tax wage; in the iso-elastic case, an increase in the average tax rate increases the pre-tax wage by more than the tax...

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 argues that one cannot tell a convincing story of the rise in OECD unemployment without mentioning the slowdown in productivity and real wage growth that occurred in the 1970s. It is argued that whereas most authors have regarded any effects of the slowdown on unemployment as...

It is common to hear the argument that poor labour market performance in OECD countries in recent years is the result of shifts in relative demand against less-skilled workers. But, there is much dispute about whether these trends have been occurring and, if they have, how important they are in...

This paper uses a number of economic models to suggest ways in which the mandatory pre-strike ballots introduced in the UK Trade Union Act 1984 might be expected to affect union democracy, strike activity, wage and employment.

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 and employment in agriculture....

Debate about the effect of minimum wages on employment in the United Kingdom has not paid much attention to the impact of the existing system of minimum wages, the Wages Council. In this paper, we look at the consequences of the declining importance of the Wages Council in the 1980s for wage...

This paper examines the structure of wages in a very specific labour market, for care assistants in residential homes for the elderly on England's "sunshine coast". This sector corresponds closely to economists' notion of what should be a competitive labour market as: (i) there are a large...

Classical labour supply theory is one of the most sophisticated parts of labour economics. Yet, there is no compelling theoretical reason to believe in an outcome on a classical labour supply curve and it is unclear whether it is a good empirical description of the way in which labour markets...