In 2008-09, the UK experienced its deepest recession since the Second World War. One notable feature of this recession was, however, the resilience of employment, which fell by just 2.1% at a time when GDP fell by 6.3%. This suggests that firms may have been trying to weather the recession by...

The Social Mobility Foundation (SMF) is a charity that aims to make apractical improvement to social mobility in the UK by encouraging and supporting access to "high-status" universities and professional occupations for high attaining pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. The SMF's programmes...

In China, the employment rate among middle-aged and older urban residents is exceptionally low. For example, 27% of 55-64-year-old urban women were in work in 2013, compared to more than 50% in UK, Thailand and Philippines. This paper investigates potential explanations of this low level of...

Since the early-1990s the UK experienced an unprecedented increase in university graduates. The proportion of people with a university degree by age 30 more than doubled from 16% for born in 1965-69 to 33% for those born ten years later. At the same time the age profile of the graduate premium...

The share of home-cooked food in the diet of UK households declined from the 1980s. This was contemporaneous with a decline in the market price of ingredients for home cooking relative to ready-to-eat foods. We consider a simple model of food consumption and time use which captures the key...