Employment

This paper studies dynamic discrete choices by relaxing the assumption of rational expectations.

Allostatic load and effort-reward imbalance: associations over the working-career

Reduced muscle strength is an accurate predictor of functional limitations, disability, and mortality. Hence, understanding which socio‐economic factors contribute to preserve muscle strength in old age is central to the design of social policies that help reducing these health risks.

We look at how strongly shocks to asset values affect labour supply, using Italian data.

Overall, high-skilled individuals form an important group of potential migrants because of both their relatively high rates of mobility and their potential contribution to the host economy. Studying migrant selection in this context is particularly useful because these migrants face low formal barriers to migration and are unlikely to be credit constrained. The observed selection patterns underline the relevance of the Roy/Borjas model in this setting.

Exploring industry dynamics and the response to minimum wage hikes.

Unemployment insurance programs in most Western countries follow a common design. The benefits are set at a constant replacement rate for a fixed period, typically followed by lower benefits under unemployment assistance. In such systems, the hazard rate from unemployment typically declines from an initial peak the longer workers are unemployed, surges at unemployment exhaustion, and declines thereafter.

We examine the effectiveness of two time-limited in-work benefits. These were introduced in Great Britain in the early to mid 2000s and were known as ‘in work credit’ (IWC) and the ‘Employment Retention and Advancement demonstration’ (ERA).

We document that households in the UK with extremely low measured income tend to spend much more than those with merely moderately low income. This phenomenon is evident throughout three decades worth of microdata and across different employment states, levels of education and marital statuses.

The Government has introduced substantial reforms to the pay of teachers in the English local authority (LA) maintained sector, to give schools greater freedom to decide how much they pay teachers and how quickly their pay progresses. This study set out to identify what reforms schools were making, what influenced their decisions, and the perceived implications for staff and schools.

Since the 1970s, many countries have established free or highly subsidized education for all preschool children in the hope of improving children’s learning and socio-economic life chances and encouraging mothers to join the labor force. Evaluations reveal that these policies can increase maternal employment in the short term and may continue to do so even after the child is no longer in preschool by enabling mothers to gain more job skills and increase their attachment to the labor force. However, their effectiveness depends on the policy design, the country context, and the characteristics of mothers of preschoolers.

Expanding access to pre-school education and childcare services has been a key policy on the agenda of many governments for over 30 years. Several motivations have been at the heart of these policies.

This paper studies whether adverse selection can rationalize a universal mandate for unemployment insurance (UI). Building on a unique feature of the unemployment policy in Sweden, where workers can opt for supplemental UI coverage above a minimum mandate, we provide the first direct evidence for adverse selection in UI and derive its implications for UI design.

Instructional time is seen as an important determinant of school performance, but little is known about the effects of student absence. Combining historical records and administrative data for Swedish individuals born in the 1930s, we examine the impacts of absence in elementary school on short-term academic performance and long-term socio-economic outcomes.

The government is considering easing the current restraint on the pay of public sector workers. It had previously announced in 2015 that public sector pay scales would only increase by an average of 1% per year up to and including 2019–20. This briefing note describes the trade-offs faced by the government when deciding how to set public sector pay.

Objectives: To extend research on workforce participation beyond age 50 by describing entire employment histories in later life and testing their links to prior life course conditions.

This briefing note analyses the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat plans for public sector pay, and what the implications of their policies are for the public sector.

This briefing note, released as part of the IFS's pre-election analysis, provides key information about minimum wages in the next parliament.

We develop a new quantile-based panel data framework to study the nature of income persistence and the transmission of income shocks to consumption.