This paper uses microeconomic data from the UK Family Expenditure Surveys (FES) and the General Household Surveys (GHS) to describe and explain changes in the distribution of male wages. Since the late 1970s wage inequality has risen very fast in the UK, and this rise is characterised both by...

This Paper examines changes in the distribution of wages using bounds to allow for the impact of non-random selection into work. We show that bounds constructed without any economic or statistical assumptions can be informative. Since employment rates in the UK are often low they are not...

This Paper looks at public sector pay in Britain. We present a novel instrument that exploits the variation in public sector status across individuals arising from the privatisation programme of the 1990s. We show formally that results that are estimated may thereby be robust to self-selection...

ABSTRACT This paper examines misclassification error in survey estimates of disability. The results suggest that a significant number of those with a disability fail to be recorded as such in the British Household Panel Survey. In addition, the probability of a false positive is estimated as...

This examination of establishment-level data from the Workplace Industrial Relations Surveys of 1980, 1984, and 1990 shows that the proportion of British establishments (that is, workplaces in both the private and public sector) that recognized unions for collective bargaining over pay and...

We present a job posting model of a labour market where jobs differ in characteristics other than wages and workers differ in their marginal willingness to pay for such characteristics. This creates incentives for firms to separate workers by posting multiple jobs. The interaction between these...

This paper examines changes in the distribution of wages using bounds to allow for the impact of non-random selection into work. We show that worst case bounds can be informative. However, since employment rates in the UK are often low they are not informative about changes in educational or...

This paper compares trends in male and female hourly wage inequality in the United Kingdom and the United States between 1979 and 1998. Our main finding is that the extent and pattern of wage inequality became increasingly similar in the two countries during this period. We attribute this...

The relationship between unions and earnings dispersion is examined using establishment-level data from the 1980, 1984 and 1990 Workplace Industrial Relations Surveys. Initially the cross-sectional relationship is examined using the 1990 data. The earnings dispersion of skilled and semi-skilled...