Labour supply and workforce

The key to extending employment and earnings is to focus policy on improving the flows into work for people leaving school and for mothers with young children, and on expanding work among people in their 50s and 60s.

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.

In this paper we set out a theoretical framework for the systematic consideration of “randomisation bias”, and provide what is to our knowledge the first empirical evidence on this form of bias in an actual social experiment, the UK Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) study.

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.

A model of labour supply is developed in which individuals face restrictions on hours choices. Observed hours reflect both the distribution of preferences and the distribution of offers.

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

In this briefing note, we combine various data sources to provide for the first time a consistent picture on how the size and composition of the public sector workforce has changed over the past 50 years.

We consider how influential corporate income taxes are in determining where firms choose to legally own intellectual property.

estimate and test the restrictions of a collective model of household consumption, using z-conditional demands, in the context of a large conditional cash transfer program in rural Mexico. The model can explain the impacts of the program on the structure of food consumption.

In this paper we examine the learning achievement of primary school pupils in Vietnam and explore the relationships between home-background, teacher, peer and school factors and learning progress in Grade 5, using data from Young Lives. We find that disadvantaged pupils receive relatively equitable access in relation to indicators of ‘fundamental’ school quality, a considerable policy success regarding the provision of ‘minimum standards’. However, differences by home advantage are relatively large where more sophisticated ‘opportunities to learn’ are considered, such as the number of hours of instruction received, including through ‘extra classes’, as well as access to learning resources such as computers, internet and non-text books.

This paper was presented at The 8th IZA Conference on Labor Market Policy Evaluation co-hosted by the IFS and PEPA. The conference took place on 18 and 19 October 2013

This CAYT report examines the transitions that new graduates make as they leave university and enter the labour market.