This paper looks at evidence on the employer size-wage effect for the UK using data from the General Household Survey, British Social Attitudes Survey and the Workplace Industrial Relations Survey. We find that much larger effects in the non-union sector and for women. We consider various...

Since the abolition of the Wages Councils in September 1993, agriculture is the only sector in the UK economy covered by any form of minimum wage legislation. This paper investigates the impact of the system of minimum wages on the level and structure of earnings in agriculture and the level and...

In this paper I consider the rapid decline in the unionization rate that has occurred in Britain since the late 1970s. An establishment based analysis reports that the overwhelming factor in explaining falling unionization was a failure to organise the new sorts of establishments that were set...

Recessions lead to short-term job loss, lower levels of happiness and decreasing income levels. There is growing evidence that workers who first join the labour market during economic downturns suffer from poor job matches that have a sustained detrimental effect on their wages and career...

We investigate the rapid influx of overseas students into UK higher education and the impact on the number of domestic students. Using administrative data since 1994/5, we find no evidence of crowd out of domestic undergraduate students and indications of increases in the domestic numbers of...

In this paper we use longitudinal data on children and their parents to assess the extent of intergenerational mobility in Britain. Based on data from the National Child Development Survey, a cohort of all individuals born in a week of March 1958, we find that the extent of intergenerational...

Since the abolition of the Wages Councils in September 1993, agriculture is the only sector in the UK economy covered by any form of minimum wage legislation. This paper investigates the impact of the system of minimum wages on the level and structure of earnings and employment in agriculture....

This paper compares and contrasts estimates of the extent of intergenerational income mobility over time in Britain. Estimates based on two British birth cohorts show that mobility appears to have fallen in a cross-cohort comparison of people who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s (the 1958 birth...

Debate about the effect of minimum wages on employment in the United Kingdom has not paid much attention to the impact of the existing system of minimum wages, the Wages Council. In this paper, we look at the consequences of the declining importance of the Wages Council in the 1980s for wage...

This paper examines the structure of wages in a very specific labour market, for care assistants in residential homes for the elderly on England's "sunshine coast". This sector corresponds closely to economists' notion of what should be a competitive labour market as: (i) there are a large...