This report looks at trends in public sector pay and compares these with what has been happening in the private sector. We start by analysing the overall levels of public and private sector pay, including how they have evolved over recent years and the differences after accounting for the...

In a previous study we examined the impact on employment of increasing the state pension age for women from age 60 to 61 (Cribb, Emmerson and Tetlow, 2013). This short paper incorporates more recent data, now available up to March 2014, which allows us to study the impact on employment over the...

This paper tries to assess whether or not we have any empirical evidence of links between early retirement and youth unemployment. Most economists would today dismiss the idea immediately as another version of the naive 'lump-of-labor fallacy'. In its most basic form, this proposition holds that...

We use a unique dataset, containing individual survey data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing linked to administrative data on earnings histories from administrative records, to construct measures of lifetime earnings and examine how these relate to financial resources in retirement....

The paper examines how individuals respond to complex decision-making environments - in particular, whether up-front financial incentives are an effective policy lever to change behaviour. The paper argues that incentives differ in their transparency and in their complexity; individuals are more...

Prices of real and financial assets fell substantially in the UK during 2008-09. The fourth wave of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) was in the field throughout this 'financial crisis'. We use these data and earlier ELSA waves first to document the effect of the crisis on the...

The UK has enacted a number of reforms to the structure of disability benefits, which has made it a major case study for other countries thinking of reform. The introduction of Incapacity Benefit in 1995 coincided with a strong decline in disability benefit expenditure, reversing previous sharp...

The paper investigates the short run responsiveness of National Health Service (NHS) nurses' labour supply to changes in wages of NHS nurses relative to wages in outside options available to nurses, utilising the panel data aspect of the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings. We find the short run...