Presentation the DWP of the findings from the 2011 Survey of Employers' Pension Provision, covering: the overall level of provision; the nature of provision (types of scheme, contribution rates, eligibility rules); and employers' plans in respect of the forthcoming workplace pension reforms.

Research on employers’ hiring discrimination is limited by the unlawfulness of such activity. Consequently, researchers have focused on the intention to hire. Instead, we rely on a virtual labour market, the Fantasy Football Premier League, where employers can freely exercise their taste for...

This Discussion Paper is an updated and revised version of a paper accepted to the Oxford Review of Economic Policy to reflect the subsequent data releases. Dr Angus Armstrong, National Institute of Economic and Social Research, Economic and Social Research, Council Senior Fellow and Centre...

Most empirical studies of savings behaviour that take explicit account of uncertainty consider for identiÂ…cation data that describe the evolution of circumstances observed during an appreciable period of the life-course. Here we report results obtained using a dynamic programming model that...

Across countries, union membership and voter turnout are highly correlated. In unadjusted terms union members maintain a roughly 0.10 to 0.12 point gap in voting propensity over non-members. We propose a model – with three causal channels -- that explains this correlation and then empirically...

Theory suggests that government should as far as possible smooth taxes and its recurrent consumption spending, which means that government debt should act as a shock absorber, and any planned adjustments in debt should be gradual. This suggests that operational targets for governments (e.g. for...

Economic performance in the UK improved over 1997 and 2007 in comparison to other OECD countries. We employ growth accounting and cross–country regression analysis to identify factors behind this relative improvement in performance. Based on growth accounting analysis, we find out that,...

There is a growing consensus based on extensive experimental evidence that people are generally influenced by myopia when making decisions of an intertemporal nature.

Many firms encourage employees to own company stock through share plans that subsidise the price at favorable rates, but even so many employees do not buy shares. Using a new survey of employees in a multinational with a share ownership plan, we find considerable variation in joining among...

A detailed longitudinal dataset is assembled containing annual performance and biographical data for every player over the entire history of professional major league baseball. The data are then aggregated to the team level for the period 1920-2009 in order to test whether teams built on a more...