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...

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...

The NiGEM-S model is based on the National Institute Global Econometric Model, NiGEM, a large-scale structural macro-econometric model of the world economy, which the National Institute has been developing since 1987. NiGEM is used for forecasting and policy analysis by NIESR and model...

Speaking note, Royal Society of Edinburgh, January 2014

Presentation to Leading Change, a TUC workshop for union leaders, University of Warwick. Presents latest evidence on union membership, coverage, organisational capacity and union effectiveness.

Many politicians believe they can intervene in the economy to improve people’s lives.  But can they?  In a social experiment carried out in the United Kingdom, extensive in-work support was randomly assigned among 16,000 disadvantaged people.  We follow a sub-sample of 3,500 single parents...

Despite its potential to raise productivity, performance-related-pay (PRP) is not widespread in market-oriented economies. Furthermore, despite secular changes conducive to its take-up, there is mixed evidence as to whether it has become more prominent over time. Ours is the first paper to...

Using the Young Finns Study (YFS) combined with the Finnish Linked Employer-Employee Data (FLEED) we show that quantities of creatine measured in 1980 prior to labour market entry affect labour market outcomes over the period 1990-2010. Those with higher levels of creatine (proxied by urine...