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Several reforms increased the state pension age (SPA) in the UK and equalised it to age 65 for both men and women. We use panel data and a difference-in-difference approach to comprehensively analyse the direct and indirect effects of these reforms, investigating mechanisms for indirect effects. We also analyse the heterogeneity of the effects of smaller versus larger increases in SPA, by partnership status, as well as spill-over effects to male partners. Consistent with previous research, we find a positive impact of the reform on employment and labour force participation, but also large negative impacts on various aspects of personal, financial, and mental wellbeing. The effect is larger for women who have to wait longer to reach their SPA, and smaller for women with a partner (compared to those without a partner). The effect of the reform partially spills over to affected women partner's labour market participation. Our results can be generalised to other countries that are seeking to implement similar reforms.

We examine whether couples in the UK increase labour supply to cushion the fall in earnings from a job loss and whether behaviours differ between periods of growth and of recession. We consider both male and female earners in single and dual earner couples and look at various dimensions of labour supply adjustment. We find evidence of labour supply reactions, but they can be negative as well as positive, particularly at the extensive margin. During the recession, household reactions are either unchanged or couples increase their attachment to the labour market, with bigger positive reactions and smaller negative ones. People do not seem to react in advance of job losses, suggesting that unemployment typically comes as a surprise.

Analyses of ethnic and racial wage differentials neglect the fact that minorities cluster in urban and in more deprived areas. This paper estimates ethnic wage differentials by comparing minorities to the majority in the same local labour market and therefore facing similar socio-economic conditions. Location is important: in the UK ethnic wage differentials and their variation across areas are partly explained by job characteristics and especially occupation. Since minorities in some areas are worse off compared to minorities in other areas, there may be scope for policy to incentivise mobility of specific groups.

We compare school-to-work transitions of British graduates belonging to ethnic minorities to those of white British. Six months after graduation ethnic minorities are substantially less likely to be employed than white British even after accounting for parental background, local area characteristics and detailed differences in qualifications. We show that university quality has a little impact while resources measured by parental background and the characteristics of the local area are more important for the labour market outcomes of ethnic minority graduates than for white British. Minorities lacking these resources earn less and are less likely to be employed compared to white British.

This paper provides an integrated interpretation of qualitative and quantitative data examining how couples respond when one partner loses their job. According to economic theory there may be an ‘Added Worker Effect’ where, when one partner loses their job, their spouse enters the labour market or takes on additional hours to compensate. The paper uses a multiple methods approach to gain a fuller understanding of couples’ responses pre and post the UK Great Recession and to explore the factors influencing couples’ decision-making process when experiencing a job loss. The paper is therefore a synthesis of findings produced by quantitative and qualitative elements of the same project and aims to explore where the findings from each methodological strand of the research can contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics of household decision making and couple’s labour supply responses to job loss.

This paper analyses differences between unemployed and employed job seekers in job finding rates and in the quality of the job found. Compared to the unemployed, employed job seekers have a smaller pool of job offers that they consider acceptable; this leads to lower job finding rates but better quality jobs. Differences in job quality are tiny when unobserved heterogeneity and selection into accepting a job are accounted for. Hence, differences are mostly due to behaviour of unemployed people rather than negative signaling or employer discrimination.

We investigate the reaction of couples to a job loss during periods of growth and recession in the UK focussing on re-employment of the spouse who lost their job. Re-employment was faster for those with a partner in work, but was not generally affected by other measures of the partner's labour market attachment or resources. For men, the strongest partner effects were for entry into high quality jobs; and having a working partner substantially mitigated the negative impact of the recession on entry into these jobs. For women, an employed partner was associated with a greater likelihood of re-entry into any type of job. Hence, while dual earner families may be able to restore the pre-job loss income level, single earner families are more likely to be trapped in cycles of low-quality jobs and no jobs leading to a decrease in household income over time. The difference in outcomes between single and dual earner couples is likely to increase during recessions.

We use a panel of UK households to analyse the impact that various individual, household and dwelling characteristics have on energy expenditures and whether changes in household socio-economic circumstances translate in changes in energy expenditures. Socio-economic characteristics have a moderate impact on per-capita energy expenditures, while dwelling characteristics and especially household size have much larger impacts in magnitude. Similarly, the largest changes in energy expenditures are related to changes in household size rather than to changes in other socio-economic and dwelling characteristics. The recent socio-demographic trends will make it harder to design policies to effectively reduce the carbon footprint of a country, while policies influencing cohabitation and family size may have positive indirect effects.

This paper exploits a new large data source on environmental behaviours and attitudes of people living in the UK to analyse to what extent the household context affects pro- environmental behaviours at the individual and household levels. The results suggest that singles and people living in couples without children have higher pro-environmental behaviour than people living in couples with children. Individual pro-environmental behaviour is affected by partner’s attitudes and behaviours, and both partners are equally relevant for household decisions. The results also show a positive correlation between concerns about the environment and pro-environmental behaviours.

We examine how couples’ labour supply behaviour in the UK responds to a job loss by one partner, using the Labour Force Survey to compare the period of growth of 1995-2007 to the Great Recession and its aftermath of 2008-11. In single earner couples during the recession, both men and women substantially increased their job search activity following a partner’s job loss, while the increase in search during the boom was smaller (and non-existent for men). However, the increase in job search during recession did not appear to translate into more success in finding work for either men or women. Among dual earner couples, we find little evidence that individuals searched for alternative jobs or tried to increase their hours if their partner lost their job, except that women working part-time were more likely to start looking for another job. Both men and women were more likely to quit their job voluntarily if their partner lost their job, but the recession seems to have made people more cautious about voluntarily quitting their job. We find little evidence that people react in advance of job losses, suggesting that unemployment typically comes as a surprise.

The job search literature suggests that on-the-job search reduces the probability of unemployed people finding a job. However, there is little evidence that employed and unemployed job seekers are similar or apply for the same jobs. We compare employed and unemployed job seekers in terms of their individual characteristics, preferences over working hours, job-search strategies and employment histories, and identify how any differences vary over the business cycle. We find systematic differences which persist over the business cycle. Our results are consistent with a segmented labour market in which employed and unemployed job seekers are unlikely to directly compete with each other for jobs.

The 2004 accession of Eastern European countries to the EU has generated concerns about the influx of low-skill immigrants to those countries which did not impose restrictions to immigration, namely Ireland, Sweden, and the UK. However, there is lack of recent systematic evidence on the level of immigration and the quality of the new immigrants. We focus on the UK and combine the British and the European Labour Force Surveys to analyse whether immigration to the UK has changed substantially before and after the 2004 EU enlargement, and as a consequence of the recent economic downturn. We analyse 1) trends of immigration into the UK of people from Eastern European countries, and how these trends compare to trends in immigration from Western European countries; and 2) how such immigrants fare in the British labour market in terms of employment probability, wages, and job quality compared to British natives, to earlier immigrants, and to people in the country of origin. Keywords: East-West migration, UK labour market, immigrant assimilation JEL Classification: F22; J30; J61

Different disciplines within the social sciences have produced large theoretical and empirical literatures to explain the determinants of anti-immigration attitudes. We bring together these literatures in a unified framework and identify testable hypotheses on what characteristics of the individual and of the local environment are likely to have an impact on anti-immigration attitudes. Most of the previous literature focuses on the explanation of attitudes at the individual level. When cross country comparisons are involved the heterogeneity across countries is modelled by fixed or random effects in multilevel models. We analyse anti-immigration attitudes across regions of 24 European countries to explain why people living in different regions differ in terms of their attitudes towards immigration. We isolate the impact of the region from regressions using individual-level data and explain this residual regional heterogeneity in attitudes with aggregate level indicators of regional characteristics. We find that regions with a higher percentage of immigrants born outside the EU and a higher unemployment rate among the immigrant population show a higher probability that natives express negative attitudes to immigration. Regions with a higher unemployment rate among natives however, show less pronounced anti-immigrant attitudes.

The 2004 accession of Eastern European countries (EU8) to the European Union has generated concerns about the influx of low-skill immigrants to the Western member states (EU15). Only three countries, namely Ireland, Sweden, and the UK, did not impose restrictions to immigration from Eastern Europe. Did the elimination of barrier to immigration have an impact on the quality of immigrants arriving to the UK? Using EU15 immigrants as a control group, we find systematic differences between EU8 immigrants arrived before and after the enlargement. The elimination of barriers to immigration seems to have changed the quantity and quality of EU8 immigrants to the UK.

Recent theoretical and empirical models of job search and job matching include on-the-job search as one of the relevant variables and implicitly or explicitly assume that on-the-job search increases in periods of growth and decreases in economic downturns. Because of lack of suitable data, however, such assumptions have not yet been tested empirically. This paper uses individual data from the British quarterly Labour Force Survey to estimate the number and the proportion of employed people engaging in on-the-job search, how these vary across regions, and over the business cycle. These measures of on-the-job search are also compared to proxy measures commonly used in the literature, such as job-to-job moves.

This paper combines individual data from the British Household Panel Survey and yearly population estimates for England to analyse the impact of cultural diversity on individual wages and on different aspects of job satisfaction. Do people living in more diverse areas have higher wages and job satisfaction after controlling for other observable characteristics? The results show that cultural diversity is positively associated with wages, but only when cross-section data are used. Panel data estimations show that there is no impact of diversity. Using instrumental variables to account for endogeneity also show that diversity has no impact.

We use individual data for Great Britain over the period 1992-2009 to compare the probability that employed and unemployed job seekers find a job and the quality of the job they find. The job finding rate of unemployed job seekers is 50 percent higher than that of employed job seekers, and this difference remains even when controlling for differences in observable worker characteristics and job search behaviour. We present evidence suggesting that these differences in the job finding probability is caused by behavioural differences between employed and unemployed job seekers rather than differences in characteristics. Consistent with search theory, we find that employed job seekers are more selective in evaluating job offers and are therefore less likely to find a job offer acceptable; for example, they are less likely to accept low-wage and temporary jobs, or jobs that do not meet their working hour requirements.

This paper estimates individual wage equations in order to test two rival non-nested theories of economic agglomeration, namely New Economic Geography (NEG), as represented by the NEG wage equation and urban economic (UE) theory , in which wages relate to employment density. The paper makes an original contribution by evidently being the first empirical paper to examine the issue of agglomeration processes associated with contemporary theory working with micro-level data, highlighting the role of gender and other individual-level characteristics. For male respondents, there is no significant evidence that wage levels are an outcome of the mechanisms suggested by NEG or UE theory, but this is not the case for female respondents. We speculate on the reasons for the gender difference.