Human capital

This paper examines the impact of in utero exposure to the Asian influenza pandemic of 1957 upon childhood development.

This report explores what types of firm engage with the apprenticeship programme and if there are characteristics that make them more or less likely to offer apprenticeships.

This paper presents the findings from two experiments designed to test the hypothesis that individuals' notions of distributive justice are associated with their economic status relative to others within their own society.

This study investigated the hypothesis that offering vocational options in Year 10 can help improve levels of educational engagement and subsequent outcomes among young people disengaged from education.

This report analyses the impact that ERA has had on a variety of outcomes experienced by working members of the New Deal for Lone Parents and Working Tax Credit target groups, as well as on the tax year earnings of working members of the New Deal 25 plus target group.

Co authored with Manuela Angelucci (Arizona) and Giacomo de Giorgi (Stanford)

This paper looks at how to design policy on informal labour markets.

We develop an empirical search-matching model with productivity shocks so as to analyze policy interventions in a labour market with heterogeneous agents.

We use unique workplace and employee-level data to evaluate a major UK government pilot program to increase qualification-based, employer-provided training for low-qualified employees.

The aim of this report is to explore how the four-year findings from the experimental research relate to the impacts that would have been experienced, on average, by all the people who were eligible for ERA, had they participated in the programme.

We specify a life-cycle model of consumption, labor supply and job mobility in an economy with search frictions. We distinguish different sources of risk, including shocks to productivity, job arrival, and job destruction. Allowing for job mobility has a large effect on the estimate of productivity risk. Increases in the latter impose a considerable welfare loss. Increases in employment risk have large effects on output and, primarily through this channel, affect welfare. The welfare value of programs such as Food Stamps, partially insuring productivity risk, is greater than the value of unemployment insurance which provides (partial) insurance against employment risk.

This Briefing Note reviews developments in welfare policy under the current government and analyses the manifesto proposals of the three main political parties in this policy area.

This paper discusses recent developments in the literature that studies how the dynamics of earnings and wages affect consumption choices over the life cycle.

We present evidence on whether and how a household's behavior is influenced by the presence and characteristics of its extended family.