Immigration is a phenomenon of growing significance in many countries. Increasing social tensions are leading to political pressure to limit a further influx of foreign-born persons on the grounds that the absorption capacity of host countries has been exceeded and social cohesion threatened....

The increasing proportion of immigrants in the population of many countries has raised concerns about the 'absorption capacity' of the labour market, and fuelled extensive empirical research in countries that attract migrants. In previous papers we synthesized the conclusions of this empirical...

The wage curve literature consistently finds a negative relationship between regional unemployment rates and regional wages; the most widely accepted theoretical explanations interpret the unemployment rate as a measure of job competition. This paper proposes new ways of measuring job...

We use individual data for Great Britain over the period 1992-2009 to compare the probability that employed and unemployed job seekers find a job and the quality of the job they find. The job finding rate of unemployed job seekers is 50 percent higher than that of employed job seekers, and this...

The job search literature suggests that on-the-job search reduces the probability of unemployed people finding a job. However, there is no evidence that employed and unemployed job seekers are similar or apply for the same jobs. We combine the Labour Force Survey and the British Household Panel...

The 2004 accession of Eastern European countries (EU8) to the European Union has generated concerns about the influx of low-skill immigrants to the Western member states (EU15). Only three countries, namely Ireland, Sweden, and the UK, did not impose restrictions to immigration from Eastern...

We compare employment and earnings of British graduates belonging to ethnic minorities to those of white British six months and three and a half years after graduation. Six months after graduation all ethnic minority graduates are less likely than whites to be employed but those who have a job...

Different disciplines within the social sciences have produced large theoretical and empirical literatures to explain the determinants of anti-immigration attitudes. We bring together these literatures in a unified framework and identify testable hypothesis on what characteristics of the...

Several reforms increased the state pension age (SPA) in the UK and equalised it to age 65 for both men and women. We use panel data and a difference-in-difference approach to comprehensively analyse the direct and indirect effects of these reforms, investigating mechanisms for indirect effects....

We compare school-to-work transitions of British graduates belonging to ethnic minorities to those of white British. Six months after graduation ethnic minorities are substantially less likely to be employed than white British even after accounting for parental background, local area...