The paper uses newly available cross-section data to study wage determination in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. The main results are as follows: (1) fear of unemployment substantially depresses pay; (2) there is some evidence of a wage ratchet whereby rates of pay are more flexible upwards...

This paper, which follows in an London School of Economics tradition begun by A. W. Phillips and J. D. Sargan, examines the role of unemployment in shaping pay. In contrast to most of the literature, it (1) uses microeconometric data on individuals and workplaces, (2) examines a variety of data...

This paper argues that wage determination is best seen as a kind of rent-sharing in which workers' bargaining power is influenced by conditions in the external labor market. It uses British establishment data from 1984 to show that pay depends upon a blend of insider pressure (including the...

Following A. W. Phillips's (1958) original work on the United Kingdom, applied research on unemployment and wages has been dominated by the analysis of highly aggregated time-series data sets. However, it has proved difficult with such methods to uncover statistically reliable models. This paper...

Although there exists a large literature on the effects of trade unions upon wages, there is no published work that uses microeconomic data on establishments to examine the employment consequences of unionism. This paper addresses this issue with a recent British data set and shows that, even...

The determinants of British white-collar pay are investigated using two surveys of establishments and four surveys of employees. It is found that, just as for manual employees, wages are highest in large foreign-owned workplaces with low proportions of part-time and female workers. There is some...

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...