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This paper examines the earnings returns to learning that takes place following the conventional "school-to-work" stage of the life-course. We operationalise such "lifelong learning" as the attainment of certified qualifications in adulthood, following the completion of the first period of continuous full-time education. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) for the period 1991-2006, our approach and findings represent an important addition to the existing evidence base. By using annual data, we are able to employ the fixed effects estimator, which eliminates the problem of time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity. Our dynamic specification uses a lag structure to consider how earnings returns evolve in the medium and longer run, whilst also controlling for wage trends which were evident "prior" to qualification attainment. Our results show a medium-run return for women of 10% on hourly wages. For men, initial suggestions of a similar positive return are eliminated once pre-qualification trends are taken into account. This suggests that adult learning has a causal effect on women's subsequent earnings but, for men, any apparent gain is due to selection. (Contains 6 tables and 3 figures.)

Recent studies of social mobility have documented that not only who your parents are, but also where you grow up, substantially influences subsequent life chances. We bring these two concepts together to study social mobility in England and Wales, in three post‐war generations, using linked Decennial Census data. Our findings show considerable spatial variation in rates of absolute and relative mobility, as well as how these have changed over time. While upward mobility increased in every region between the mid‐1950s and the early 1980s, this shift varied across different regions and tailed off for more recent cohorts. We also explore how domestic migration is related to social mobility, finding that those who moved out of their region of origin had higher rates of upward mobility compared to those who stayed, although this difference narrowed over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this note, we use the UK Labour Force Survey to estimate the wage return to an additional year of schooling for Scotland and Northern Ireland exploiting the 1972 Raising of the School Leaving Age (RoSLA). Prior literature on this topic has consistently ignored both countries in a UK context, likely due to an incorrect belief that they were not affected by the 1972 RoSLA until some years later. We demonstrate that both countries were affected by the education reform in 1972 and our estimates suggest a positive effect on hourly wages for Scotland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper we add to the existing evidence base on recent trends in inter‐generational social mobility in England and Wales. We analyse data from the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study (ONS‐LS), which links individual records from the five decennial censuses between 1971 and 2011. The ONS‐LS is an excellent data resource for the study of social mobility because it has a very large sample size, excellent population coverage and low rates of nonresponse and attrition across waves. Additionally, the structure of the study means that we can observe the occupations of LS‐members' parents when they were children and follow their own progress in the labour market at regular intervals into middle age. Counter to widespread prevailing beliefs, our results show evidence of a small but significant increase in social fluidity between 1950s and the 1980s for both men and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines to what extent individual measures of well-being are correlated with daily weather patterns in the United Kingdom. Merging daily weather data into the British Household Panel Survey allows us to test whether measures of self-reported well-being are correlated with temperature, sunshine, rainfall and wind speed. We are able to make a strong case for causality due to 'randomness' of weather in addition to using methods that eliminate time-invariant individual-level heterogeneity. Results suggest that the effect of daily weather on measures of subjective well-being is negligible; although there is some evidence that sunshine affects job satisfaction negatively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reforms which increase the stock of education in a society have long been held by policy-makers as key to improving rates of intergenerational social mobility. Yet, despite the intuitive plausibility of this idea, the empirical evidence in support of an effect of educational expansion on social fluidity is both indirect and weak. In this paper we use the raising of the minimum school leaving age from 15 to 16 years in England and Wales in 1972 to estimate the effect of educational participation and qualification attainment on rates of intergenerational social class mobility. Because, in expectation, children born immediately before and after the policy was implemented are statistically exchangeable, the difference in the amount of education they received may be treated as exogenously determined. The exogenous nature of the additional education gain means that differences in rates of social mobility between cohorts affected by the reform can be treated as having been caused by the additional education. The data for the analysis come from the ONS Longitudinal Study, which links individual records from successive decennial censuses between 1971 and 2001. Our findings show that, although the reform resulted in an increase in educational attainment in the population as a whole and a weakening of the association between attainment and class origin, there was no reliably discernible increase in the rate of intergenerational social mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The perception is that formal representation is increasingly common in UK Employment Tribunals (ETs), as case volumes and complexity increase. We investigate the nature of representation in UK ETs using the 2003 and 2008 Survey of Employment Tribunal Applications (SETA). The results suggest that between 2003 and 2008, the extent of formal claimant representation declined. The majority of employers and claimants are either heavily represented or have little/no representation, and there is little evidence that claimant representation is a response to employer representation at least at the level of individual claims. Overall, however, it would seem that some of the 'accessible, informal and inexpensive' characteristics envisaged by Donovan continue to apply only to cases within certain jurisdictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the relationship between educational attainment in compulsory schooling and truancy. Using data from the Youth Cohort Study ( YCS) of England and Wales and the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England ( LSYPE), we estimate the impact of truancy on indicators of educational performance. The YCS measures both truancy and attainment as ordered responses. Our bivariate ordered probit model with mixed effects deals with both the ordered nature of the data and the potential endogeneity of truancy. In addition, it allows us to estimate the distribution of the truancy effect on educational attainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using American panel data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, this article investigates the effect of working during grade 12 on attainment. We employ, for the first time in the related literature, a semiparametric propensity score matching approach combined with difference-in-differences. We address selection on both observables and unobservables associated with part-time work decisions, without the need for instrumental variable. Once such factors are controlled for, little to no effects on reading and math scores are found. Overall, our results therefore suggest a negligible academic cost from part-time working by the end of high school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Workplace mediation is high on the British policy agenda. To date, however, despite growing awareness, organisational experience in Britain remains limited and the evidence base accordingly underdeveloped. This paper contributes to the debate by undertaking secondary quantitative analysis of an Acas Omnibus Poll of 500 SMEs. Two substantive issues are explored: the characteristics associated with previous experience of mediation in resolving workplace conflict; and the extent to which prior knowledge and experience of mediation in this context impact on a range of attitudinal variables. In respect of the former we find firm size to be important, while for the latter the data suggest attitudes are typically more positive among experienced firms. This is most notably true in relation to the perceived cost of mediation and (subject to a qualification) to its suitability for smaller firms, both of which are crucial drivers of the uptake of mediation among smaller organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]