The increase in unemployment in the United Kingdom that accompanied the Great Recession has been conspicuous by its moderation. The rise in joblessness is dwarfed by the recent experience of the United States, by past recessionary episodes in the U.K. and by the contraction in GDP in the U.K....

Over the last decade the British Labour Government has presided over unprecedented increases in levels of spending on the National Health Service (NHS). But Opposition parties now claim that this record growth in NHS expenditure has been misspent, and some commentators are already predicting...

This article examines the influence of debt on the behaviour of households and firms in the recent recession. It compares the levels of debt in the two sectors in recent years, and the sectors’ reactions to indebtedness. It then considers each sector in turn. Debt was more unevenly spread...

This paper seeks to contribute to the literature on downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR) along two dimensions. First, we formulate and solve an explicit model of wage-setting in the presence of worker resistance to nominal wage cuts - something that has previously been considered intractable....

Immigration to the UK has risen in the past 10 years and has had a measurable effect on the supply of different types of labour. But, existing studies of the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born workers in the UK (e.g. Dustmann, Fabbri and Preston, 2005) have failed to find any...

Britain, perhaps uniquely, has experienced simultaneoud rises in both wage inequality and polarisation of eployment across households over the past twenty years. This article investigates the inter-relations of these two trends by examining the changing nature of new jobs and the characteristics...

One important feature of labour market policy over the past 15 years has been an emphasis on promoting greater flexibility and responsiveness in wages to the fortunes of individual firms. This study analyses the patterns of persistence in British private manufacturing wage settlements using a...

While most studies of the decision to immigrate focus on absolute income differences between countries, we argue that relative change in purchasing power or status, as captured by an individual's ranking in the wage distribution, may also be another important determinant of the migration...

Recent evidence suggests that unemployment benefit recipients search more extensively than non-recipients. It is conceivable that benefit claimants, looking for work in a more formal search environment, enjoy an informational advantage relative to non-claimants. This paper examines how such an...

We study worker turnover in a transition economy to investigate to what extent the length of time a worker has been employed by a firm shapes the turnover process. Using data from the Polish Labour Force Survey and The Russian Longitudinal Monitor Survey we compare the pattern of turnover with a...