Human capital

This article uses individual data on employment and wages to try to understand whether real wage flexibility can help shed light on the UK’s productivity puzzle.

This study focuses on the transmission of inequality over the working life. A model of constrained intertemporal choice is used to provide structure to the distributional dynamics of wages, earnings, income and consumption. The mechanisms used to insure labour market shocks are examined in a partial-insurance setting where the manner and scope for insurance depends on the access to credit, the information available to consumers and the durability of income shocks. Drawing on recent research, family labour supply, the credit market and the tax system are all shown to play a key role. These mechanisms vary in importance across different points of the life cycle and the business cycle.

This paper provides causal estimates of the effect of teacher pay on pupil attainment using a sharp geographical discontinuity in teacher salaries.

This note examines the public sector pay differential using the latest figures.

This paper estimates the impact of a long-established pre-school nursery programme on children's nutritional status.

This paper analyses the career progression of skilled and unskilled workers with a focus on how careers are affected by economic downturns and whether formal skills, acquired early on, can shield workers from the effect of recessions.

This article outlines how a home visiting intervention in Colombia, delivered at scale through partnering with existing social welfare systems, successfully increased the variety of play materials and play activities in poor households with children aged between 1 and 2 years at the start of the intervention.

From an economic point of view, the period since the recession that began in 2008 has been quite unlike any other period since at least the Second World War, including the periods after the recessions of the early 1980s and early 1990s. Indeed, the slowdown has lasted for longer, and its effects on the public finances, on household incomes and on productivity have been more marked even than was the case in the 1930s. This time really does seem to be different.

We study the transmission of risk attititudes in a unique survey of mothers and children in which both participated in an incentivised risk preference elicitation task.

We consider the impact of tax credits and income support programs on female education choice, employment, hours and human capital accumulation over the life-cycle.

This CAYT report discusses the strengths and limitations of several approaches to assessing the effect of education on productivity.