In the conventional perfectly competitive model of the labour market, wage-setting is individualistic in the sense that identical workers should receive identical wages in different firms and different workers should receive different wages in the same firm. But, in reality, wages often seem to...

This paper extends work by Burdett and Mortensen (1989) and Mortensen and Vishwanath (1991) and examines equilibria in a matching model with identical firms and workers in which employed as well as unemployed workers receive wage offers. It shows that there are generally a continuum of...

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

Most studies of the gender pay gap use cross-section earnings functions to apply a Oaxaca decomposition into the contributions of differences in characteristics and coefficients. But the accounts that these studies provide of the gender pay gap are often hard to relate to more informal stories...

Recent research in labour economics (e.g. the work of Card and Krueger, 1995, on the impact of minimum wages) has led to renewed interest in the appropriate model to use when thinking about the labour market. But, the standard textbook models of both perfect competition and monopsony are both...

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 takes a model of the employment contract which is incomplete in the sense that the required effort level is not exactly specified when employment is agreed and in which each worker negotiates their own contract with their employer. Given the incompleteness of the employment contract,...

Because of labour market frictions, the supply of labour to a firm does not fall instantaneously to zero if an employer cuts wages. This gives employers some monopsony power. In the absence of trade unions, minimum wages and efficiency wage considerations a profit-maximising employer will set a...

Between 1993 and April 1999 there was no minimum wage in the UK (except in agriculture). In this paper we study the effects of the introduction of a National Minimum Wage (NMW) in April 1999 on one heavily affected sector, the residential care homes industry. This sector contains a large number...

The human capital earnings function is part of the toolbox of labour economists. Returns to labour market experience are interpreted as returns to general human capital, and returns to job tenure as returns to job-specific human capital. There is, however, an awareness that there are other...