This paper overviews key findings concerning the evolution of job skill requirements in Britain, and their relationship to technology and work organisation, based on surveys dating from 1986. The use of skills has been rising, as indicated by several indicators covering multiple domains....

Despite its relatively small size, the private school sector plays a prominent role in British society. This paper focuses on changing wage and education differentials between privately educated and state educated individuals in Britain. It reports evidence that the private/state school wage...

Using new job requirements data for Britain I show that there has been a rise in various forms of communication tasks: influencing and literacy tasks have grown especially fast, as have self-planning tasks. External communication tasks, and numerical tasks have also become more important, but...

We consider the links between training, the quality of labour and establishment performance, using a proxy for performance, commercial survival. We develop a model in which managers have varying beliefs about the efficacy of education and training, leading to potential variation in the optimal...

Job security is an important aspect of work quality. Accumulating evidence shows that insecurity has deleterious impacts on individuals and households, and in the mid-1990s, job insecurity became a public and political issue. This paper critically examines the concept and measurement of job...

Effort-biased technological change and other explanations for work intensification are investigated. It is hypothesised that technological and organizational changes are one important source of work intensification and supportive evidence is found using establishment data for Britain in the...

In the 1997 and 1998 waves of the British Household Panel Survey, workers are asked to assess their level of job security in terms of the probability of becoming unemployed within the next year. We examine whether these perceptions of insecurity are purely subjective or are systematically...

We investigate the relationship between training and the likelihood of commercial survival over a 7-year period, using a survey of British establishments. We find that in establishments of 200 or more employees, increased training of those in Professional, Sales, and Clerical and Secretarial...

We investigate whether trends in job satisfaction, which arguably signal trends in worker well-being, can be explained by changes in the quality of jobs. There were falls in job satisfaction in both Britain and Germany. Elsewhere job satisfaction has been either stable or declining very slowly....

Increasing dispersion in the returns to graduate education is found, using quantile regression. This trend is related to rising overqualification. We distinguish between and validate measures of Real and Formal overqualification, according to whether it is or is not accompanied by...