Effort-biased technological change and other explanations for work intensification are investigated. It is hypothesised that technological and organizational changes are one important source of work intensification and supportive evidence is found using establishment data for Britain in the...

Job security is an important aspect of work quality. Accumulating evidence shows that insecurity has deleterious impacts on individuals and households, and in the mid-1990s, job insecurity became a public and political issue. This paper critically examines the concept and measurement of job...

This paper shows that employability strongly moderates the effects of unemployment and of job insecurity on well-being. I develop a simple framework for employment insecurity and employability with two key features. First, it allows for the risks surrounding unemployment and employment...

Using new job requirements data for Britain I show that there has been a rise in various forms of communication tasks: influencing and literacy tasks have grown especially fast, as have self-planning tasks. External communication tasks, and numerical tasks have also become more important, but...

I consider the concept of employment insecurity and provide new evidence for 1997 and 2005 for many countries with widely differing institutional contexts and at varying stages of development. There are no grounds for accepting that workplaces were going through a sea-change in employment...

Many commentators have argued that "key skills" are becoming more important in modern workplaces. This paper draws on a survey that uses a methodology based on job analysis to measure skills at work, and estimates their implicit prices using a hedonic wage equation. The main new findings are...

I investigate evidence concerning two indicators of the pressure of work, namely work hours and the intensity of effort during work hours ("work effort"). Interest in both is motivated by efficiency and welfare considerations, but analysis is typically attenuated by poor measurement. I first...