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Dynamic monopsony suggests that, due to labour market frictions, workers will be paid below their productivity. This paper uses the stochastic frontier technique to estimate the degree of this underpayment for UK employees. It finds evidence of significant underpayment. The estimates are used to examine whether the predictions of dynamic monopsony are empirically accurate. No conclusive evidence against this theoretical framework is found. The paper also investigates whether payment according to productivity is a sufficient condition for the elimination of the 'working poor' problem. Due to the existence of an unemployment barrier, it finds that the minimum wage is not an effective anti-poverty policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oliver Williamson argues that the attributes of the employment contract, like intermediate transactions in general, are essentially driven by the specificity of assets. In the case of the organization of work it is the particular attributes of labour that determines the transaction costs of any given governance structure. The paper presents a stylized account of the transaction cost model of the efficient organization of work, stressing an underlying tension and ambiguity in the transaction cost framework. The paper exploits a unique dataset to test, for the first time with British data, Williamson's transaction cost predictions concerning the nature of employment contracts. Williamson tacitly assumes that asset specificity is exogenous in general. However, there is evidence in the literature that labour specificity is endogenous to employment contracts. The paper endeavours to demonstrate that there is empirical evidence to suggest that specialized labour is indeed endogenous in the transaction cost model. The major implication is that the organization of work cannot be considered as an example of the efficient organization of intermediate transactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper endeavours to provide some estimates of the costs and benefits of VERs and tariffs in the nonleather footwear sector. This is a sector where both instruments are used, and where the former has assumed some importance over the past seven or eight years.
Section II of the paper develops a simple partial equilibrium framework which can be used to identify the price and output effects of VERs and tariffs. Section III estimates the costs and benefits of tariffs and quotas combined, as well as separately. Section IV considers possible orders of magnitude of adjustment costs and employment effects, whilst Section V offers some concluding comments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the distribution of unemployment experience in Britain within the framework of the Han and Hausman semi-parametric estimator, which has the advantage of circumventing problems associated with individual heterogeneity arising from unobserved individual characteristics. The results imply that the unemployment burden is unequally distributed among the working population. Males and females bear an unequal unemployment burden. The study casts light on the characteristics of those individuals who are most likely to experience a high unemployment burden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commentators frequently remark on the need to pay high levels of chief executive officer remuneration to attract, motivate and retain the best executives for Britain's leading companies. This paper presents the results of an empirical investigation into tenure, promotion and executive remuneration. The remuneration of the chief executive officers at some of Britain's largest businesses is examined. In the majority of cases the CEO had not been lured away from rivals but had risen through the internal labour market, often after a long-term employment relationship. Moreover, long job tenure and internal promotion were associated with higher levels of pay. It is concluded that understanding of this controversial issue will be improved if it is recognized that a part of current executive pay may be a reward for previous successful performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"In this paper we estimate earnings functions for native born and foreign born white and non-white males in the English labour market, using data from the Quarterly Labour Force Survey.... Our results highlight the importance of distinguishing between native born and foreign born males when investigating the labour market experience of ethnic minorities. Furthermore, the earnings performance amongst white immigrants varies considerably.", (excerpt)

This paper reports results of an empirical study on the effectiveness of labour market policy. Data from Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Sweden and the United States are used to apply a simultaneous equation model with wages and employment being the endogenous variables. In order to explain employment, the amount of unemployment benefits per unemployed (passive labour market policy) and payment for wage subsidies and training per employed and unemployed person (active labour market policy) are used in addition to real wages and output. Wages and output have their expected impact on total employment. It turns out that passive labour market policy has a negative, and active labour market measures a positive, effect on the number of persons employed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the proximate reasons for the observed decline in employment in the UK textiles and clothing sectors during the period 1980-89. It provides estimates of import penetration, growth in demand and growth in labor productivity for the two industry groups. Utilizing the statistical technique of shift share analysis the paper suggests that growth in labor productivity rather than import penetration may be the principal reason for the observed loss of jobs in the two industry groups.
This paper estimates the extent of import penetration of domestic markets in the UK for clothing and textiles during the decade 1980-90 and evaluates its contribution to the observed loss of jobs in the two industry groups, relative to that of other factors. Such an evaluation is timely in view of the likely phasing out of the MFA, if not its demise, as a result of the Uruguay Round negotiations. Section II of the paper briefly discusses the growth in investment of the UK textiles and clothing sector over the period 1980-90, and provides estimates of import penetration of the sector. Section III discusses the relative contribution of growth in demand, import penetration and productivity growth to the observed change in employment in the two industry groups, utilizing the statistical technique of shift share analysis. Section IV briefly summarizes the main conclusions of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the nature of demand for private health, insurance in a health care market in which the consumer can neither opt out of tax payments for nor lose his entitlement to public health care. A single equation econometric model of the demand for private health cover is estimated using the 1982 General Household Survey. The results indicate that income and employment status are significant determinants of the probability of health insurance purchase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper relates fluctuations in employment in various categories of service industry in the UK to fluctuations in the gross domestic product (GDP), and compares the results with those for manufacturing and construction. In general, services are not found to be homogeneous in terms of their cyclical employment responses, with the distinctions between public and private and between consumer and producer industries both being of importance. In particular, public service industries' employment appears unresponsive to cyclical variations in GDP, and only producer services have the same degree of responsiveness as manufacturing and construction industries.
The aim of this paper is to analyse the cyclical variations in service industries' employment in recent decades. This approach contrasts with much recent literature which has concentrated upon the secular increase in the share of service industries' employment in total employment and the decline in the share of manufacturing industry.[1] The importance of this alternative approach lies both in providing more information about the characteristics of the service sector and in examining what is, in itself, a question of some interest. Given the importance of public services in the service sector and the need to recognize the heterogeneity of private services, the analysis considers several well-defined categories of services and provides comparative results for these categories with those for other sectors in the UK economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the variability of female employment in the 1970s. It is based on data from the New Earnings Survey so that the behavior of employment in the manual-nonmanual and manufacturing--nonmanufacturing sectors can be studied separately. At an aggregate level the results are compared to those derived using data from the Department of Employment, to ensure that the results are not simply the product of possible sampling variation of the New Earnings Survey. The findings of this paper, though far from conclusive, indicate that female employment vis--vis male employment became more stable after 1976. There may be many reasons for the decrease in relative variability of female employment in the second half of the 1970s; however, the way our sample is split coincides with the implementation of the Equal Pay Act and the Sex Discrimination Act which have become effective since 1976. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main argument of this paper is that labour utilization rates should be estimated from an acceptable production function rather than relying solely upon a simple proportional relationship between output and employment, which is the case with existing methods. This approach was prompted by the recent paper by Leslie and Wise (1980), who have obtained convincing results in fitting a modified Cobb-Douglas production function to UK data. Two earlier papers which have influenced the development of the method of estimating labour utilization rates explored in the present paper are those of Farrell (1957) and Klein and Preston (1967).
The remainder of the paper is in four sections. Section II describes a previous approach the trend-through-peaks (TTP) method to estimating labour utilization rates and highlights its major disadvantages. Section III shows how some of the more serious drawbacks of the TTP method may be overcome. Section IV presents the results of various sensitivity tests on the method of estimating the utilization rate of employed labour proposed in this paper. The estimates produced by this method for individual UK industry groups are then compared with the TTP estimates. The conclusions are given in Section V.
It should be noted that it is not the purpose of this paper to produce a definitive set of labour utilization estimates for the UK. The aim is simply to explore the possibility of developing a more acceptable method of estimating the utilization rate of employed labour than those methods currently in use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Their main Finding is a clear negative relationship between activity rates and unemployment, even for male (primary) workers. On the basis of their equations, the authors suggest that about 500 000 additional men would have been in the official labour force now[1] but for the severity of unemployment in 1970 and in subsequent periods.
The results are in striking contrast both with the White Paper on Unemployment Statistics (Cmnd 5157, November 1972), and with a recent article in the Department of Employment Gazette of November 1973. One of the conclusions of the White Paper is that 'earlier estimates of the numbers who are seeking work but not registered as unemployed have been greatly exaggerated ... There is no evidence from the Census that large numbers of people have dropped out of the labour force' (paragraph 1.7). The Gazette article states: 'The tendency for some people to leave employment without registering as unemployed is not a new phenomenon, and there is no evidence that it was greater after 1966 than before' (p 1083).
The aim of this note is to try to account for the difference between these two views. The White Paper and the Gazette both suggest that the main reason for the apparent fall in mate activity rates in 1966 to 1971 was the large increase in the numbers in full-time education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the discrepancy between recorded unemployment and real unemployment in the regions of Great Britain. The study was prompted in part by the numerous attempts made to measure hidden unemployment for the US economy (see MINCER(5)), but it differs from earlier studies on two counts. First, unlike these earlier studies, which have concentrated on measuring hidden cyclical unemployment, an attempt is made here to explore the possibility of measuring the structural variety of hidden employment. Second, a different method has been used to calculate hidden cyclical unemployment than in earlier studies.
The paper is in five parts. Part I examines the gap between real unemployment and recorded unemployment, and argues for a division of this gap into cyclical and structural components. The second part-describes operationally useful methods of measuring hidden unemployment. In parts 3 and 4, the methods of measuring hidden unemployment are applied to the regions of Great Britain and to a sample of North-West localities. Part 5 compares the findings with two earlier studies (CORRY and ROBERTS (2) and STILWELL (8)). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study how early-life cognitive skills, non-cognitive abilities, and family characteristics influence educational choices and affect later employment outcomes and wages. The analysis was carried out on a cohort of UK females observed at different life stages by adopting the British National Child Development Study database. Our findings provide evidence of how early-life abilities and family characteristics affect both the educational attainment and later labour market outcomes of female workers. However, we found that educational levels interact with early-life abilities, productive characteristics in general, and other characteristics, giving rise to different employment outcomes and income prospects conditioned on educational attainment. Occupational outcomes and wages of low-educated women are more sensitive to factors that are not strictly linked to productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a probit model of labour force participation and a set of earnings equations estimated using data from the 1980 Women and Employment Survey. The results of the participation model compare with previous findings and the earnings models give typical results for human capital and job characteristics variables. Exclusion of the sample selection effect appears to be of importance and a linear piecewise experience variable outperforms the quadratic specification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a set of employment functions for nine individual engineering industries using annual data for the period 1954-1987 for the United Kingdom. A brief review of alternative theoretical specifications is undertaken. A set of co-integrating regressions is computed to establish the existence of a long-run equilibrium relationship between employment and inter alia output and real wages. Based on the results of the co-integration exercise, full unrestricted dynamic equations are obtained and these are then reduced to a more parsimonious representation. The finally preferred restricted models are then tested against a number of diagnostic statistical criteria to establish their robust and efficient properties. The value of these equations for explaining past and predicting future employment and training in the engineering sector is assessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports empirical work on the relationship between organizational status and performance in the UK. There is a belief that a change from public to private ownership (privatization) results in improved performance. However, ownership is only an element in a complex model determining performance. Other variables include the extent of competition, internal management incentives and structures, and the external environment as reflected in government economic policy and expectations (e. g. the enterprise culture, the level of taxation). On this basis, a change in the status of an organization associated with different managerial incentives and internal structures, without any change in ownership, may account for a change in performance. Some commentators, though, believe that managerial incentives and internal structures are interrelated with ownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the determinants of labour turnover within an industry. By carrying out an analysis at this level it has been possible, unlike previous studies, to distinguish specifically voluntary quits from all the other reasons for termination of employment; for an important distinction is drawn between voluntary and involuntary separations from employment. Involuntary terminations will principally cover redundancies, although it might be extended to include dismissal on disciplinary grounds. By contrast voluntary separations, often referred to as 'natural turnover', include both quits and retirements on grounds of ill health or age. It is voluntary quits that are the least predictable or beyond the control of the firm, and which may impose significant costs. It is the causes of variations in the rate of quits that this study attempts to isolate.
Section II reviews previous work in this area, and Section III describes the data that were available for this study. It was apparent that an internal labour market operated within British Railways, and the implications of this are discussed in Section IV. Section V reviews the rationale for the inclusion of the relevant variables in the regression analysis, and suggests the expected relationship to quits. The results of the analysis are discussed in Section VI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the employment creation effects of financial assistance to industry. The assistance schemes covered are the regional policy instruments of Regional Development Grant and Regional Selective Assistance, and the assistance policies of local authorities and a number of other agencies. Using survey data and regression techniques it is shown that there are significant variations in cost-effectiveness between assistance schemes and between projects of different purpose. A policy implication of this is that agencies could increase the employment creation effects of their policies by focusing assistance on particular types of project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1971, the Bolton Committee of Inquiry on Small Firms (HMSO, 1971) expressed concern over the declining share of small firms in economic activity. Its report showed, inter alia, that the employment share of small establishments, defined as those with less than 200 employees, in manufacturing had been declining since the mid-1920s. Since 1971, however, the trend has been reversed, with the small establishment sector (SES) accounting for a growing share of total employment. Now the published Annual Census of Production (ACOP)[1] data from which these trends are calculated do not give any indication of the relative importance of flows of employment into or out of the 'small' category, or of employment change among establishments that remain in the category. Yet such information is likely to be important for policy. For example, the implications for industrial policy of a small establishment sector which is growing because large establishments are getting smaller are likely to be different from those where the reason for growth is an expansion of births.
This paper takes a first step towards supplying the relevant information by presenting the results of some special tabulations obtained from the ACOP data for the period 1979-83. These tabulations show that over a period when the share of total employment accounted for by the SES in manufacturing rose by over 20%, small establishments have in general become much less able to generate employment. Furthermore, it is clear that the share of the SES has been boosted by small establishments becoming less able to grow out of the SES, and by a greater contraction of large establishments into the sector. Neither of these phenomena can be said to reflect industrial vigour in the SES. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study described here used the data of Dun and Bradstreet (UK), the commercial credit rating, market research and information company, to estimate job generation performance in Britain between 1971 and 1981. Computer software was developed to enable us to analyse the file, which contains records for 180000 establishments in 1971, and 200000 in 1981. Despite its size, it is important to bear in mind that it is only a sample, and that bias has been introduced into it by the method of data collection and by the commercial purpose for which it is intended. It is estimated that the file represents about 75% of private sector employment. To check on accuracy the data are compared with ACOP and other aggregate statistics, and a questionnaire survey was carried out comprising a sample of almost 1000 firms.
The findings in this paper suggest that all sizes of firms make a contribution to employment creation in the UK. Any policy to encourage small firms should focus on their overall contribution to the health of the economy, and not just on job creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the results of empirical tests of the direct employment effects of reductions in defence spending. Defence was chosen since it is one of the few British examples of a major spending department with a substantial history of cuts. Reductions in military spending were associated with the Defence Reviews of 1957, 1965-68 and 1975 (Hartley, 1981). The basic question posed was whether the Defence Reviews resulted in manpower reductions in the numbers of military personnel, civilians and civil servants employed by the Ministry of Defence. The facts to be explained are shown in Table 1. For military manpower, one major event was the 1957 Defence Review which announced the abolition of conscription and its replacement by a smaller all-volunteer force to be achieved by the end of 1962. Within the civilians group, some care is required in interpreting the data. There have been changes in counting conventions, alterations in departmental responsibilities involving the transfer of staffs well as considerable recategorization from industrial to nonindustrial status and the 'civilianisation' of Service posts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to explore the relevance of job search theories to the analysis of discrimination with a new data source which compares British West Indian and white school leavers. It was found to be possible, in the light of the empirical results, to state the conditions under which the economic models of job search are appropriate representations of black and white young men's employment and unemployment experiences in British labor markets. The next section briefly summarizes some of the problems of incorporating discrimination into job search theories. The data are then described followed by the results and conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, Kaldor's first and second laws have been examined. It was found that the 'remarkable correlation' between the growth of GDP and industry is largely illusory. When the preferable specification of the relationship between the growth of the non-industrial sector and industry was estimated, it was found that the good fit is largely determined by two extreme observations: Japan and the UK. This finding does not imply that industry is not an important determinant of the growth of the rest of the economy nor that the present de-industrialization of the UK will not have adverse effects on the future level of employment. Rather it suggests that the relationship is more complex that would seem from the simple bivariate regression estimated by Kaldor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effect of local authority fiscal policy on employment at the local level has hardly been studied in the UK. This, to a large extent, reflects a preoccupation with the effects of alternative macro-policy programmes at the national level and with regional policy and urban planning policy at the local level. The situation is in contrast to the USA, where the federal system of government gives considerable fiscal autonomy, such that alternative policy programmes will quite obviously have markedly different effects on local economies (Tiebout, 1956; Oates, 1971). Yet in the UK also, what little work has been done suggests that individual local authority fiscal decisions will affect both population and jobs (Alt, 1971; Gripaios et al., 1979; Cuthbertson et al., 1979). In the context of planned reductions in local authority expenditure, it is crucially important, therefore, that more should be known about the relationship between this factor and levels of employment.
In this paper, we extend the work of Cuthbertson et al. (1979). They examined the effect of local authority fiscal policy on employment in Greater London and estimated that one-quarter of the actual decline in total employment[1] in the average borough in the period 1966-71 was attributable to fiscal crowding out. In respect of local authority fiscal policy, our model improves upon that of Cuthbertson et al. (1979) in four main ways. First, it applies to England and Wales as a whole and is, therefore, more general. Second, it encompasses the effect of fiscal decisions by higher tier, strategic authorities such as the Greater Manchester Council, whereas the above study ignored them. Third, the important data imperfections of the above study concerning education expenditure do not apply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of explanations have been offered for the cause of the shift in the relationship between unemployment and unfilled vacancies, but recently Holden and Peel (1975, 1977), Parikh (1977) and Warren (1977) have shown the basic equation of that analysis to be invalid. Warren claims that a disequilibrium approach to the problem reveals that there is no equilibrium relationship, making the discussion of shifts irrelevant. This paper demonstrates that a disequilibrium model with time dependent parameters reveals that there has been both a shift in the flow of quits and lay-offs from employment and a decline in the efficiency of searching for work.
A variety of reasons have been offered for the cause of the shift in the relationship between registered unemployment and unfilled vacancies (the UV relationship). Gujarati (1972), Taylor (1972) and Foster (1974) have agreed that there has been an artificial increase in unemployment since the latter half of 1966 although their explanations for this shift have differed. Gujarati (1972) proposed that the Redundancy Payments Act (1965) and the National Insurance Act (1966) were fundamental in reducing the costs of search for employment, thereby artificially increasing the level of unemployment. Taylor (1972) suggested that the shift in the UV relationship was caused by a deliberate change in the employment policy of firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a perpetual conflict in the United Kingdom over the post-war years between the achievement of full employment and balance of payments equilibrium. The crux of the problem has been an adverse balance of trade made worse at full employment by the general inability of domestic producers to meet domestic demand. In this paper we attempt to do three things: (1) to examine the specific hypothesis that bottlenecks in the labour market have contributed to the conflict by raising the level of imports above what it would otherwise have been; (2) to quantify the effect that bottlenecks have had on the level of imports, both at the level of demand prevailing over the period under study and at a hypothetical level of 'full' employment defined as 2 per cent unemployment, and (3) to identify those industries in which a bottleneck effect may have been at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous empirical estimates of the relationship between unemployment and unfilled vacancies in Great Britain have been obtained from a mis-specified model. In particular, past studies have attempted to estimate an equilibrium relation directly from observations which have in general been generated from disequilibrium states of the labour market. This paper presents and estimates a disequilibrium, job search-labour turnover model of the labour market, using quarterly British data, from which a static equilibrium 'UV' relationship can be derived. The empirical results suggest that there is no statistically significant equilibrium relationship between unemployment and vacancies in Great Britain. Consequently, the recent controversy over explanations for alleged shifts in this relationship may have been 'much ado about nothing.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the alleged 'shake-out' of labour in the mid-sixties in Britain and provides an additional test to discriminate between the conflicting explanations of the upwards displacement of the VU curve. The method employed involved the use of a short run employment function, from which estimates of the parameters of the desired labour function can be obtained. If the upward displacement of the unemployment/vacancy relationship took place because of dishoarding we would expect to observe a significant structural break in the short run employment function. The exact form of structural change observed will depend on the kind of dishoarding that occurred in late 1966. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The realization of the value of training for employees can take time as the training contributes dynamically to an extended development process. This research examines the empirical returns to training in three post-training situations: when the employee remains in the same job and with the same employer; when the employee transfers to a different job but remains with the same employer (internal mobility); and when the employee moves to a different employer (external mobility). Panel data and fixed effects (FE) methodology are used to quantify the joint effects of in-job training and mobility, while minimizing the potentially biasing effect of unobserved ability. In a period when public sector employment in Britain was contracting sharply, the short-term returns to training are nonetheless greater in the public sector, while the medium-term returns for both public sector and private sector employees depend on remaining within sector. The general/specific training mix, institutional influences, adverse selection, and the concept of ‘transferable’ training, all contribute to interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents a cost-benefit analysis of Britain’s Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) demonstration, which was evaluated through the first large-scale randomized control trial in the UK. ERA used a combination of job coaching and financial incentives in attempting to help long-term unemployed men and low-income lone parents sustain employment and progress in work once they were employed. Using both administrative and survey data, ERA’s effects on benefits and costs were estimated through impact analyses, which exploited the experimental design. The findings indicated that ERA was cost beneficial for long-term unemployed adult men, but not for lone parents. The key findings appear robust to sensitivity tests. Uncertainty, as implied by the SEs of the estimated impacts, was addressed through a Monte Carlo analysis, an approach seldom previously used in cost-benefit analyses of social programs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines whether a more flexible labour market – defined here in terms of the strictness of labour regulations regarding the flexibility of employers to adjust levels of employment in response to changing economic conditions – helps to promote a higher level of fixed capital formation in an economy. Theory generates ambiguous predictions concerning the sign of the relationship between investment and the labour market regulation regarding hiring and firing workers, although a positive relationship may be expected. Using an index of labour market regulation compiled from surveys of business executives in 19 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) economies, an econometric analysis is carried out to examine the effects of labour market flexibility on the level of investment in the manufacturing sector. The findings support the proposition that freeing-up regulatory constraints on employers’ use of labour helps to create a more favourable environment for investment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A model of crime is developed based on principles from the existing literature with some original insight. The implications of the model are that income inequality and unemployment are important explanatory variables for crimes motivated by economic gain, but do not offer much explanatory power for other types of crime. Panel data of UK regions over the years from 2002 to 2007 are then used to test these predictions. The empirical results strongly support the hypothesis that crime is an economic phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses information from an ad hoc module on disability in the 2002 UK Labour Force Survey to identify the heterogeneity that exists within the disabled group and examine its impact on labour market outcomes. After controlling for a range of personal characteristics, the type, severity, duration and cause of the disability are found to be important determinants of employment, but there is less evidence to support the influence of within group heterogeneity on earnings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While structural change and regional differences in the pattern of employment specialization are widely perceived to be significant factors in accounting for disparities in the labour market performance of regions in the United Kingdom, there have been relatively few recent attempts to gather detailed evidence on this issue. The current study aims to fill this gap by examining the effects of structural change and associated changes in the pattern of employment specialization on three key indicators of regional labour market performance: the rate of employment growth, the unemployment rate and the rate of nonemployment. The findings indicate that while industry structure has statistically significant effects on regional labour market performance, the quantitative significance of these effects is relatively small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions of the UK's recent labour market performance commonly mention the contrasting trends in the unemployment rate (down), the employment rate (up) and the inactivity rate (flat). These same commentaries also notice that the 'flatness' of the overall inactivity rate masks contrasting trends by sex, with male rates (slowly rising) and female rates (slowly falling) and then proceed to discuss male inactivity in some detail before concluding. Bypassing the composition of female inactivity, these commentaries fail to notice that the male and the female proportions of the population not working by reason of sickness or disability are quite similar. Equally they have rarely noticed that male and female non-employment rates display a very similar regional hierarchy with female rates in the 'North' as much as 50% higher than those in the 'South', and that there is an even steeper North-South gradient in some of the components of non-employment. For example, sickness and disability rates for females in the North are up to 10% of the working age population, while in the South rates are typically less than half that size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A structural VAR methodology is used for UK data to identify and map out the effects of innovations in the money supply, employment, output, wages and prices. Moreover, bands of two standard errors are computed for the impulse response functions so that comment may be made on the significance of the dynamic responses of the variables to the simulated shocks. This allows conclusions to be drawn on the persistence of shocks. Results suggest that output variation is largely determined by aggregate demand shocks over the business cycle frequency. Importantly, evidence is also found of rigidities in the form of price inertia and nominal wage stickiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]