In an extension of an earlier paper (Hart and Roberts, 2012), we investigate the pay and working time of blue-collar timeworkers and pieceworkers during the Great Depression within British engineering firms. We compare and contrast southern/midland engineering districts of Britain with northern...

Research into socio-economic impacts of the 1944 Education Act in England and Wales has been considerable. We concentrate on its two most fundamental innovations. First, it provided free universal secondary education. Second, state-funded pupils were placed into grammar schools or technical...

Based on detailed payroll data of blue collar male and female labor in Britain's engineering and metal working industrial sectors between the mid-1920s and mid-1960s, we provide empirical evidence in respect of several central themes in the piecework-timework wage literature. The period covers...

The strikes' literature is dominated by the causes and effects of strike action as they relate directly to strikers themselves. This paper considers another important group of affected workers - those individuals incidentally made idle as a result of the strike action of others. Using a unique...

Between mid-1939 and mid-1943 almost 2.2 million additional women were recruited into Britain's essential war industries. These consisted, predominantly, of young women recruited into metal and chemical industries. Much of the increased labour supply was achieved through government directed...

In this paper, we compile a unique historical dataset that records strike activity in the British engineering industry from 1920 to 1970. These data have the advantage of containing a fairly homogenous set of companies and workers, covering a long period with varying labour market conditions,...

This paper adds to the literature on the relationship between military service and long-term real earnings. Based on a regression discontinuity design it compares the earnings of age cohorts containing British men who were required to undertake post-war National Service with later cohorts who...

This paper offers a contract-based theory to explain the determination of standard hours, overtime hours and overtime premium pay. We expand on the wage contract literature that emphasises the role of firm-specific human capital and that explores problems of contract efficiency in the face of...

Researchers using changes in compulsory schooling laws as instruments have typically estimated very high returns to additional schooling that are greater than the corresponding OLS estimates. Given that the first order source of bias in OLS is likely to be upward as more able individuals tend to...

Based on firm‐level payroll data from around 2000 member firms of the British Engineering Employers' Federation we examine the behavior of real hourly earnings over the 1927‐1937 cycle that contained the Great Depression. The pay statistics are based on adult male blue‐collar workers...