Pay

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.

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 nature of the relationship between lifetime income and saving rates is a longstanding empirical question and one that has been surprisingly difficult to answer. We use a new data set containing both individual survey data on wealth holdings and administrative data on earnings histories to examine this question.

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.

We study whether and how individuals protect energy intakes against income shocks and we find that households use substitution, both between and within spending categories. Total nutritional intakes are almost fully protected against income shocks and 12-16% of permanent income shocks on food spending is transmitted to energy intake.

Using recall and diary food expenditure data from Canada, we compare estimates of the household size elasticity of per capita food expenditure.

In this paper we analyze the role of expected labor and marriage market returns as determinants of the college enrollment decisions of Mexican high school graduates. Moreover, we investigate whether the (relative) weights of these factors differ by gender. We use data on individuals’ expectations regarding future labor market outcomes which we directly elicited from the youths, and two different measures of marriage market returns. First, marriage market returns are proxied by the (net-)supply of potential partners in the youths’ local marriage markets. Second, we use data which elicits youths’ beliefs about their future spouse's earnings conditional on their own education level. We find that labor market as well as marriage market returns are important determinants of the college enrollment decision. However, boys’ and girls’ preferences differ in terms of the relative role of the two determinants, in that the relative weight of labor market versus marriage market returns is larger for boys than for girls.

Contribution ceilings and the incidence of payroll taxes

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.