This text provides an overview of the key issues concerning the performance of the labour market and policy in the UK, with focus on the 2008 financial crisis, the ensuing recession, and its aftermath. It contains assessments of the effects of many policies introduced over the last 10 years in...

The recession of 2008-2009 inflicted a larger cumulative loss of UK output than any of the other post-war recessions. Nevertheless, employment rates remained higher than might have been expected given the experience of previous recessions. The main reasons for this appear to be a combination of...

There is an apparent inconsistency in the existing literature on graduate employment in the UK. While analyses of rates of return to graduates or graduate markups show high returns, suggesting that demand has kept up with a rapidly rising supply of graduates, the literature on over-education...

An important policy issue is whether the National Minimum Wage (NMW) introduced in Britain in April 1999, is a stepping stone to higher wages or traps workers in a low-wage no-wage cycle. In this paper we utilise the longitudinal element of the Labour Force Survey over the period 1999 to 2003 to...

There is much disagreement in the literature over the extent to which graduates are mismatched in the labour market and the reasons for this. In this paper we utilise the Flexible Professional in the Knowledge Society (REFLEX) data set to cast light on these issues, based on data for UK...

The recent run of good macroeconomic news masks mounting evidence that worklessness is increasingly concentrated on selected individuals, households, and socio-economic groups and in geographical areas. These distributional aspects have been overlooked or ignored over the last 20 years, but we...