Employment

We examine the impact of increasing the early retirement age (ERA) for women in a context where the financial incentive to retire at the ERA is very limited.

We estimate a dynamic model of employment, human capital accumulation—including education, and savings for women in the United Kingdom, exploiting tax and benefit reforms, and use it to analyze the effects of welfare policy.

The distributional impact of proposed reforms plays a central role in public debates around tax and transfer policy. We show that accounting for realistic patterns of mobility in employment, earnings and household circumstances over the life-cycle greatly affects our assessment of the distributional effects of tax and transfer reforms.

We estimate the changing value of workplace pensions in the UK and incorporate their value into an estimate of the public sector pay differential.

This paper presents causal evidence on the impact of work search requirements on single parents’ transitions into work and onto other benefits.

This report, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, shows how routes into teaching have changed in recent years, and looks at the costs, benefits and retention rates for each route.

This paper deals with the relationship between family formation and employment in older cohorts of the English population born between 1916 and 1957. Based on retrospective life history data of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) and using sequence and cluster analyses, we explore three dimensions in particular: employment, marital status, and having children, and the extent to which individuals’ life course trajectories on these three dimensions vary across cohorts, gender, and level of education. While the majority of men followed a trajectory of marriage and family formation with a (relatively) continuous career, the family-work trajectories of women varied noticeably from one cohort to the next, including increased labour market participation combined with fewer and shorter breaks from work to care for children. While the current perception is that the so-called ‘baby boomer’ generation born soon after World War Two was path-breaking in terms of life course innovations, our findings are not compatible with the assumption of a single cohort being particularly pioneering.

In the context of the current policy emphasis on extending working lives, we investigate whether the relationship between participation in paid work, other formal, and informal activities among people aged 50-69 is complementary or competitive. We also investigate differences in associations between countries using comparable longitudinal data from Denmark, France, Italy, and England. We find positive associations between informal and formal engagement in cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses. Paid work was negatively associated with formal and informal engagement, and respondents who stopped working were more likely to be engaged in formal (Denmark and France) and informal activities (England and Italy) at follow-up than respondents who continued working. However, the strongest predictor of formal and informal engagement at follow-up was baseline engagement. In the context of policy aims to extend working lives and broaden older people's participation in other productive activities, new balances between work and other forms of engagement are still to be found.

We quantify the contribution of labor market reforms to unemployment dynamics in nine OECD countries (Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, UK, US).

This paper uses unique primary data on directly elicited individual subjective expectations to analyse and characterize the process that generates the income of poor, rural Indian households.

Population ageing in Western countries has made delayed retirement and extended working life a policy priority in recent years. Retirement timing has been linked to individual factors such as health and wealth, but less is known about the role of the psychosocial work environment. This paper drew upon longitudinal data on 3462 workers aged 50-69 from five waves of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA). Regression models were used to assess the association of working conditions with preferred timing of retirement and actual work exit. Adjusting for a range of covariates, job demands (aspects of the job requiring sustained physical or psychological effort) were associated with preferences for earlier retirement (by 0.18 years; 95 % C.I. 0.06, 0.31). Decision authority was associated with preferences for later retirement (by 0.38 years; 95 % C.I. 0.23, 0.53) and reduced odds of work exit (OR = 0.93; 95 % C.I. 0.88, 0.97). Low recognition at work was associated with increased odds of work exit (OR = 1.23; 95 % C.I. 1.10, 1.43). There was little evidence of any interactive relationship between demands and resources. Efforts to extend working life should address issues relating to the immediate psychosocial work environment. Providing older workers with increased sense of control, and ensuring contributions are adequately recognised, may delay retirement intentions and the timing of labour market exit.

The labour market by itself can create cyclical outcomes, even in the absence of exogenous shocks. The authors propose a theory that shows that the search behaviour of the employed has profound aggregate implications for the unemployed.

There were large cuts to the public workforce over the last parliament during a period of fiscal consolidation. The pace of public workforce cuts is likely to accelerate over the new parliament. This Briefing Note, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), looks at the movement between jobs, or ‘mobility’, of workers in the public and private sectors. It sets out the extent to which reductions in the public workforce to date have been delivered by freezing recruitment of new workers and not replacing workers who move to non-employment, and through more workers moving from the public sector to the private sector than moving in the other direction.