Individual and household based aggregate measures of joblessness can, and do, offer conflicting signals about labour market performance if work is unequally distributed. Thispaper introduces a simple set of indices that can be used to measure the extent of divergencebetween individual and...

Individual and household based aggregate measures of worklessness can, and do, offer conflicting signalsabout labour market performance. We outline a means of quantifying the extent of any disparity,(polarisation), in the signals stemming from individual and household-based measures of...

This paper compares and contrasts estimates of the extent of intergenerational income mobility over time in Britain. Estimates based on two British birth cohorts show that mobility appears to have fallen in a cross-cohort comparison of people who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s (the 1958 birth...

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...

Unemployment is a well established measure for individuals' desire for work but measures of poverty and most benefit systems focus on the household. This paper documents worklessness at a household level for 13 OECD countries over the last ten years. Variations in family size and the...

The instability of the Beveridge curve in Britain since the mid-50s has been interpreted as revealing a detioration of labour market effectiveness in matching vacancies to unemployed job-seekers. This paper repeats the stability analysis of the matching technology, having relaxed some of the...

In this paper we examine the relationship between childhood factors and subsequent economic and social success or failure as an adult. Unlike many studies which typically have little data on pre-labour market factors (other than schooling or in fewer cases, test scores) we are able to draw upon...

Productivity growth in 329 companies (total employment = 1.96 million workers) is analysed for the period 1984-1989. The study breaks new ground by (i) analysing the impact of changes in union status - such as repudiation of a closed shop or derecognition - on productivity growth; (ii) examining...

This paper analyses the increase in mothers¿ employment in Britain over the period 1974¿2000. The approach consists of isolating those birth cohorts whose mothers experienced significant increases in employment and relating those to changes in policies (maternity rights, taxation and...

Family income is found to be more closely related to sons' earnings for a cohort born in 1970 compared to one born in 1958. This result is in stark contrast to the finding on the basis of social class; intergenerational mobility for this outcome is found to be unchanged. Our aim here is to...