UK population growth over the last thirty-five years has been remarkably low in comparison with other countries; the population grew by just 7% between 1971 and 2004, less than all the other EU15 countries except Germany. The UK population has grown at a faster pace since the turn of the...

This paper examines the pattern of self-employment in Australia and the United States. We particularly focus on the movement of young people in and out of self-employment using comparable longitudinal data from the two countries. We find that the forces that influence whether a person becomes...

This paper provides evidence for the existence of a wage curve -- a micro-econometric association between the level of pay and the local unemployment rate -- in modern U.S. data. Consistent with recent evidence from more than 40 other countries, the wage curve in the United States has a long-run...

This paper compares changes in the structure of wages in France, Great Britain, Japan. and the United States over the last twenty years. Wage differentials by education and occupation (skill differentials) narrowed substantially in all four countries in the 1970s. Overall wage inequality and...

There was a time before the first Workplace Industrial Relations Survey (WIRS80) in 1980 when what we knew of industrial relations was based primarily upon small scale surveys and case studies. WIRS80 marked a radical departure in the study of industrial relations for two reasons. First,...

This paper summarizes evidence for the existence of a wage curve - a downward-sloping relationship between the level of pay and the local unemployment rate - in modern micro data. At the time of writing, the curve has been found in 40 nations. Its elasticity is approximately -0.1.

This paper describes measurement of a self-employment rate and the important role the agricultural sector plays in any analysis of the determinants of self-employment. The determinants of the self-employment rate are modeled using a panel of 23 countries for the period 1966-1996. A similar...

This paper uses broadly comparable micro data at the level of the individual to examine the extent to which union relative wage effects vary across groups and through time. The main findings may be summarized as follows. a) The union wage gap averages 15% in the US and 10% in Great Britain. b)...

Using data from the Workplace Industrial Relations Surveys of 1980, 1984, and 1990, the authors investigate processes of job creation and job destruction in Britain. They find that rates of employment growth, job creation, and job destruction were higher at the end of the 1980s than at the...

This paper is a continuation of results reported in our article "Is well-being U-shaped over the life cycle?" (Blanchflower & Oswald, 2008). It provides new evidence that well-being follows a curve through life. We use data on half a million randomly sampled individuals across eight major...