It is well understood that personal grooming provides an important source of communication about individuals, their values and personalities. From an economic point of view, grooming is a non-market activity. The standard view is that time spent in non-market activities is counterproductive as...

We construct firm-level data set with matched productivity and qualification data by linking the Annual Business Inquiry and Employer Skills Survey for England. We first examine the effect of workplace skills and other characteristics such as part-time status and gender on both productivity and...

In a series of studies written during the 1980s Bob Gregory and his co-authors compared the gender wage gap in Australia with that found in other countries. They found it was not the difference in human capital endowments that explained different gender wage gaps but rather the rewards for these...

Using new linked employee-workplace data for Britain in 2004, we find that the nature of the public private pay gap differs between genders and that of the gender pay gap differs between sectors. The analysis shows that little none of the gender earnings gap in both the public and private sector...

This study examines the role of individual characteristics, occupation, industry, region, and workplace characteristics in accounting for differences in hourly earnings between men and women in full and part-time jobs in Britain. A four-way gender-working time split (male fulltimers, male...

In this paper we investigate the evolution of the gender wage gap over early careers of skilled workers in Germany using administrative longitudinal data. Advantages of the data for this type of analysis are that we observe complete work and skill accumulation histories from the beginning for up...

This paper integrates two strands of literature on overskilling and disability using the 2004 British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS). It finds that the disabled are significantly more likely to be mismatched in the labour market, to suffer from a pay penalty and to have lower job...

This paper investigates gender differences between the log wage distributions of fulltime British employees in the public and private sectors. After allowing for positive selection into full-time employment by women, we find significant and substantial gender earnings gaps, and evidence of glass...

By international standards, rates of disability in Britain are high, and employment rates for the disabled are low. This paper reviews the impact of disability on labour market outcomes in Britain. The British situation is firstly set in a legislative and policy context. The paper then...

In this paper, we directly test Becker’s theory of employee discrimination using matched worker-workplace data from Britain. Based on a structural model with individual and firm heterogeneity, we develop and test two predictions. Firstly, if white employees have a taste for discrimination they...